Chains of Fool's Gold
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: Sixteenth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, sequel to 'The Horn That Was Blowing.' The Ministry has finally driven Harry and Draco, once Aurors of the Socrates Corps, too far. Now they're turning at bay, and they'll take the whole Ministry down with them, if they have to.
1. Wings of Owls

**Title: **Chains of Fool's Gold

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione

**Warnings: **Blood, gore, violence, torture, angst

**Rating: **R

**Summary: **The Ministry has driven Harry and Draco, formerly Aurors of the Socrates Corps, too far. Now they're turning at bay, and they're going to take the whole Ministry down with them—if they have to.

**Author's Notes:** This is the sixteenth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, following "Invisible Sparks," _Hero's Funeral, _"Rites of the Dead," _Sister Healer, _"Working With Them," _This Enchanted Life, _"Letters From Exile," _Writ on Water, _"Evening Star," _The Library of Hades, _"There Was Glory," _A Reign of Silence, _"Dictionary of Losses," _Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity_, and "The Horn That Was Blowing." I don't yet know how many chapters it will have, although somewhere between fifteen and twenty is a good guess. It will be updated every Wednesday.

**Chains of Fool's Gold**

_Chapter One—Wings of Owls_

"They're coming."

Draco looked up. He was still making a list of people who might be persuaded to help them for an adequate reward or revenge on the Ministry, and didn't like to be shaken out of it. But Harry's announcement had the sound of something important.

It was, he saw. Harry held a parchment between his hands, and the black owl that Warren had lent them sat on the temporary perch they'd installed in their bedroom, grooming its feathers in a way that said it had no intention of leaving any time soon. Harry's hands trembled a little, and he turned towards Draco.

Draco smiled. Maybe Harry was trying not to show it, but there was no way he could dim that glow in his eyes.

"Your friends accepted your invitation to stand with us, then?" he asked, turning to face Harry fully.

Harry nodded, and then broke into a grin and flung himself on the bed. "They're going to be able to know everything I do for the first time in more than _three years, _Draco. I think that's worth celebrating." He grinned at Draco and patted the bed beside him.

Draco looked at his list.

"Oh, come _on_." Harry sat up and reached for him. "You can spare a few hours from that to give me what I want." He was gently smiling now, and Draco found himself putting the list aside and reaching out to take him in his arms. Harry kissed him hard enough to hurt and tugged him towards the bed again, so that Draco almost fell out of his chair.

A sharp pop interrupted them before Draco had more than one button on Harry's clothing open, though, and he turned around with a growl of annoyance. Kreacher stood there. He was ignoring them, though, or at least his eyes were only on their faces, like the eyes of all trained house-elves. He bobbed his head as Draco glanced at him.

"Masters Harry and Draco are having a visitor," he announced.

"What?" Draco drew himself reluctantly back from Harry. He knew that Harry's friends, even if they had the Apparition coordinates now, wouldn't have come so soon, and Warren and Jenkins usually let them know by owl when they were planning to visit. It wasn't as though they could get into the house if they didn't, given all the wards. "Who is it?"

Kreacher sniffed. "Kreacher is not to be knowings all random wizards with mats in their hair," he said, and then leaned forwards and confessed in a hoarse whisper, "Kreacher is thinking that this wizard not be _bathing_."

Draco bit his lip, hard. He knew that Harry, like him, was looking at the way Kreacher's ear-hair clustered in matted tufts around his ears. But Draco nodded and said, "All right. Then we'll come out and see him. Does he look as though he's looking for the house, or just wandering around out there?"

That got him another offended glare. "Kreacher is not being reporting wandering wizards as visitors."

Draco nodded again and repeated, "All right." He felt Harry flowing to his feet beside him, reaching confidently for his wand. Draco made sure that they were standing next to each other as he reached out for Harry's arm. They couldn't Apparate through the wards, but they would do it the minute they were outside them.

And besides, a moment when they could touch was _never _a moment wasted.

* * *

Harry recovered from the Apparition, and looked around. He thought the wizard Kreacher had told them about might have been hiding. Even if someone knew they were here, they could still be an Auror from the Ministry trying to surprise them, or they could be trying to hide from Aurors.

But a big dark shape loomed against the stars and surged towards them. Harry felt Draco plunge his hand down towards his wand, hissing muffled curses. They had something to do with Kreacher not reporting that their "visitor" had shoulders like a plow and hands like a bear's, and they were reaching for them.

Harry squeezed Draco's wrist before he could fully draw his wand, and stepped forwards, grinning, to fling himself into the visitor's arms. "Hullo, Hagrid," he whispered, when he could get his breath back from the bone-crushing hug he received.

He heard Draco sniff behind him, and knew he would hear about it in a little while, but he didn't care. Not when his head was resting in a thick beard that tangled almost down to his knees, and he was feeling a lightness of heart that he hadn't in a very long time.

"Harry," said Hagrid, and there was a rumble behind the name that told Harry Hagrid would probably start crying in a minute. Harry couldn't blame him. He clung, and Hagrid clung back, and then he did sniffle, and large tears were plopping down on Harry's head. Harry just held him tighter.

He'd given Ron and Hermione permission to tell anyone they thought they could trust, anyone who would stand with them. He and Draco and Jenkins and Warren—and the people they'd compelled or coerced to help them—could use all the allies they could get.

But _this, _he'd never expected.

Harry knew why, and could feel it in Draco's pointed stare on his back, as Hagrid finally let him go and Harry stepped away to beam up at him. Hagrid couldn't keep a secret to save his life. Most of the time, Harry knew, Ron and Hermione never would have told him. But they must have included something in the owl telling Hagrid to go immediately, and not to linger long enough to tell anyone what he was doing.

"Harry," Hagrid said again, and drew a handkerchief out of his pocket to crumple it against his nose. Harry had a hard time seeing it in the darkness, but he thought it was red with white spots—the same kind Hagrid had carried when they were at school. "It does me good to see yeh again!"

He ruffled Harry's hair, which was the equivalent of flattening his hair with a pole and almost pressed him into the ground. Draco cleared his throat pointedly, and Hagrid turned to look at him. He sniffed a little, although with the sniffling he was already doing, it was hard to tell. "Never did unnerstand what yeh saw in that Malfoy to keep fightin' with him," he said, shaking his head. "But it takes all sorts, I reckon."

"Draco's a friend, now, Hagrid," Harry said quietly, and felt Draco stiffen in offense. He turned and raised an eyebrow. He'd used the word "friend" because he'd thought that Draco wouldn't want Hagrid to know about their relationship, but if Draco wanted to speak of it, then Harry was hardly going to forbid him.

Draco scowled at him and faced Hagrid. "We're partners, and lovers, and friends," he said. "So try to understand that, if you can."

Harry rolled his eyes and pressed down on Draco's arm, not over the Dark Mark, but hard enough on the muscles to make Draco hiss a little. Hagrid was looking between them in what seemed like painful bewilderment, but a second later, he drew a breath deep enough to make his own ribs creak.

"Any friend o' Harry is a friend o' mine!" he said determinedly, and stuck out his hand.

Draco stepped forwards and shook it. Hagrid still considered him as though wondering what had made Harry change his mind about someone he'd hated at Hogwarts, but then he cleared his throat and turned to Harry.

"Yer friends said that yeh needed some help with takin' down the Ministry?"

Harry blinked. He hadn't thought Ron and Hermione would put it that plainly. "You would be okay with that?" he asked cautiously.

"Yep!" Hagrid nodded firmly enough to make some of the matted hair that Kreacher had described fly forwards around his ears. "The Ministry's been nuthin' but trouble to me for _years_. They wanted to take Buckbeak away!" He seemed to have forgotten the part Draco and his father had played in that, and Harry relaxed a little. "They wanted to sack me!" Hagrid's eyes glittered, and Harry found himself remembering that he was, after all, half-giant, and the kind of harm that Grawp could cause when he wanted to. "And now they're doin' all these stupid things to yeh." He reached out a finger and poked Harry in the stomach, gently enough for him, but which made Harry still whoof out air and step back a bit. "Bloody _right _I wanna do somethin' to _them!_"

Draco said something indistinct beside him. Since Hagrid didn't seem to have heard it either, Harry decided that meant he didn't need to respond to it. "Good," he said, and grinned at Hagrid. "I wonder if you could bring some creatures into battle with you?"

Hagrid's face immediately became anxious, and he shuffled his face. "Well, yeh know, some of 'em, like the unicorns, they don't wanna leave the Forest," he muttered. "And I don' think the giants would be a _good _idea…"

Harry nodded. "Oh, I know. I was thinking more of the thestrals and the hippogriffs."

Hagrid jerked his head up and grinned. "Oh, they'd _love _it, they would!" he said, with a bellow of a laugh that made Harry glad there were no neighbors immediately adjacent to Cuthbert's Corner. "They've been waitin' _years _for a big fight!"

This time, Harry clearly heard Draco say, "And how does _he _know that?" but he didn't turn around and ask questions. If Draco didn't know why Hagrid might know more about creatures than other people, then Harry didn't consider it worthwhile trying to enlighten him.

"Good," Harry said. "Then why don't you come into our house and we can discuss it more, Hagrid."

Draco grimaced at him, but Harry shrugged when he turned around. He knew that the walls and ceilings were high enough for Hagrid in at least the rooms on the ground floor, if not upstairs, and Kreacher had spent a lot of time cleaning up dirt and cobwebs and stray Dark magic. Harry didn't think even Hagrid would do worse than maybe make a pet of some of the animals that might be running around inside the house.

"Yeh have one?" Hagrid stared around. "It must be hidden!"

He was loudly admiring when they led him inside the wards and showed how concealed Cuthbert's Corner was from the outside, and Harry was glad to see Draco relax a bit, since he had done some of the work on the wards. This strange alliance just might work after all.

Of course, he thought the real test wouldn't happen until Ron and Hermione got there, and that didn't happen until the middle of the afternoon the next day.

* * *

Draco had given himself a stern talking-to that he thought even Granger might approve of, and that meant he stood back and watched Harry hug his friends and didn't even feel jealous. Well, only a little, anyway. And that wasn't actually jealousy that Harry's friends were hugging him; it was jealousy that _Harry _had people left who would do that for him, people who weren't Draco.

Weasley held onto Harry like he'd been starving for him for months, and muttered incoherent words into his shoulder. Harry patted his shoulder back and muttered something in return. Granger stood by, her face soft but her foot tapping, until she finally reached out and poked Weasley in the back.

"_Some _of us would like a turn with Harry sometime soon, Ron," she hissed.

Weasley fell away with an embarrassed chuckle and a glance at his wife that made Draco burn with a different kind of envy. Then Granger stepped forwards and fell on Harry, and Draco knew it would be a while before they surfaced.

Weasley turned to him.

Draco stood stiff and tried to keep his most neutral mask on his face as he looked at Weasley. It shouldn't be that hard, he thought. He had faced down people in the Auror Department who _hated _him, and his parents, who thought of him as a disgrace to the family line. Compared to that, what were the little squabbles and quarrels that he and Weasley had got into when they were in school? Nothing but children's fights.

Weasley examined him with a faint frown. Draco wanted to sneer—_what, do I not fit your image of the high and mighty Auror and what they should be exactly?_—but managed to subdue his anger long enough to give a sarcastic bow instead.

"You're not what I expected," Weasley muttered.

No one could remain silent in the face of that provocation, and Draco didn't think Harry would notice anyway, preoccupied as he was in trying to answer the questions Granger forced out between sobs and little affectionate slaps on the back of Harry's head. "What you _expected_?" he drawled. "You've known me for how many years, Weasley? Did you manage to forget the color of my hair in that time?"

Weasley only remained there, his eyes so cold that Draco decided that _he _had decided he wouldn't be moved. There was no other reason for Weasley to have that lack of reaction to Draco's needling, which Draco knew was expert. Weasley just lifted his eyebrows a bit and murmured, "You're more attentive to Harry than I expected. And more tolerant."

Draco didn't know what to do with that first assertion—maybe Weasley could spot the way that Draco kept his eyes on Harry and checked in with what he needed from time to time—so he attacked the second. "I haven't cursed you yet, but you've only been here a few minutes. Give me time."

Weasley only went on looking at him, and Draco scowled. He would have preferred the red-haired, hot-headed idiot of his memories. If Draco had to deal with a new Weasley, he might either die of the shock, or not work efficiently when he was confronted with a threat. Either was bad news for Harry.

"You just did it again."

Draco reminded himself that, since Granger hadn't let go of Harry yet, Harry couldn't be expected to step between him and Weasley, and faced Weasley with a politely pained expression. "What are you on about _now_?"

Weasley gave him a contained, nasty smile. "You keep checking with him, looking at him like you're looking for something else you can sacrifice for his sake. You already gave up your family and your career. You've done more for him than a lot of people would."

"I didn't give up my family," Draco snapped. He was sure that Harry wouldn't have told his friends about the recent events with Draco's parents. "They stopped speaking to me the day I became an Auror."

Weasley just smirked at him. "But you gave up every chance that you had to return to them when you took Harry as a lover, and then insisted on keeping him. I'm sure of it. They might have wanted you back because you were their only heir, but Harry would be the sticking point, wouldn't he?"

That was so _exactly _what had happened, down to the offer Draco's parents had made to accept him back (while they still knew who he was) as long as he dropped Harry, that Draco couldn't say anything against it. He just folded his arms and scowled at Weasley, who examined Draco with piercing eyes and then nodded once.

"Both Hermione and I would do anything for Harry, too," Weasley said calmly. "And now he's finally allowing us to. He shut us out for years because he had no other choice. I understand that now," he added, because Draco's mouth had opened and Weasley probably knew that Draco would blast him for being so stupid. "But it was hard, and it hurt, and then I got suspicious when I heard you were standing at Harry's side. I thought you'd either enchanted him or you were using him for your own personal gain. Now I'm convinced that you're not, however much it might have started that way."

Draco got his breath back, and said dryly, "I see that years have sharpened your brains, but not changed your Gryffindor tactics."

Weasley nodded. "Think of it like that," he murmured. "As long as we don't kill each other, I don't think Harry will mind what we do much."

"That's what you think," Harry said, stepping back from Granger and turning around on them. Draco started a little. He hadn't realized that Harry was _listening. _"I would mind a lot if you started comparing penis length and got too caught up in that to remember exactly what we're supposed to be doing."

"Don't worry," Draco said, stepping past Weasley and slinging his arm over Harry's shoulders. To his intense pleasure, Weasley's face had turned red at Harry's comment, and it didn't seem likely that he would stop spluttering any time soon. "I already know that mine's longer."

And Granger was the one who laughed, and Draco felt a bond that could be compared to a steel circle settle into place around them. He wasn't stupid enough to think that it would solve all the things that would go wrong, or could, but it was better than he had ever thought to get along with two such…

Such…

_Gryffindors._

* * *

"I don't know about Ginny." Ron was frowning, his eyes hooded as he looked down at the list of names that Harry and Draco had drawn up. There were a lot of Draco's allies on it, people that he said would welcome a chance to get back at the Ministry, but Harry and his friends were steadily adding names, too. And foremost of the names that they were adding were Weasley ones. "She's been kind of strange the last few months. Distant."

"She got possessed by Ernhardt," Harry said quietly. "I can't blame her for not wanting to have anything more to do with us."

He caught Draco's eye, and Draco shut his mouth on the other words he had been about to say, other things they had learned about Ginny in the intersection of their case with her—private—activities. It didn't matter. They could tell Ron and Hermione about that later, or not. What mattered most of all was getting them comfortable enough to all work together.

"Fine," Harry said, and put a little X next to Ginny's name. "What about George? I know a lot of his customers come from the Ministry." They had had a good long laugh about that, years and years ago, that Ministry employees wanted to skive off work more than Hogwarts students wanted to skive off classes.

"Doesn't matter." Ron's smile was full and satisfied. "Half the time they want to bargain with him and drive down his prices, and he's got several who've threatened to shut down his whole shop because they found out he was selling to other Departments. I think he'd welcome the chance to hurt the whole corrupt lot of them."

Harry nodded in appreciation, and circled George's name. Then he turned to Hermione. She had been conspicuously quiet through this part of the conversation. Harry had thought it was because most of her allies were in the Ministry itself, rather than outside it like Ron's or Draco's, but he was starting to think it was something else. "What?" he asked. She hadn't raised many moral objections so far, but they couldn't be long in coming.

Hermione saw his raised eyebrow and rolled her eyes in response. "I never would have come this far if I intended not to participate," she said firmly. "You don't need to worry about that."

Harry nodded and touched her arm for a second, wondering if he would need to reassure her the way he did Draco. She drew herself up, which meant he didn't. "But?" he prompted, since he could feel _that _coming, even if nothing else did.

Hermione drew a long, deep breath. "What do you want to do?" she asked. "Expose the truth about the Ministry, the way you said you did in your original letter to Ron and me? Or fight them? Bring them down? Bring them to a standstill?"

"It amounts to the same thing," Draco said.

Hermione shook her head at him, but Harry was the one she went on looking at. "You told me that Hagrid talked about bringing thestrals and hippogriffs to the battle." Hagrid wasn't with them right now; he claimed he'd seen an Acromantula's nest down one of the corridors in Cuthbert's Corner, and they had been more than happy to let him go investigate it alone. "So that makes it different. In the first scenario, you leave the Ministry standing, and even let them go on talking to people as if their opinions were real, but you expose the truth between the Socrates Corps and the way they treated the twisted. In the other, you knock the whole Ministry down and rebuild again from the ashes."

"We have to do that," Draco said. "They won't let us get away with anything less."

Hermione turned on him this time, but luckily, Harry recognized the flush in her cheeks as the one she got when she was talking about _any _spirited debate, and he didn't think she'd insult Draco or treat him as less important because of what he had said in the past. "No, that's _not _true! You have a little band of allies, and some Aurors, and Hagrid, and us, and maybe a few Weasleys and whatever creatures Hagrid can bring along. That's not enough to reform society!" She swiveled around to stare at Harry. "You couldn't even anticipate that Hagrid would come. So, what are you going to do? What's the big plan?"

Harry winced a little even as he sucked in a deep breath. "You're right," he admitted. "The forces we have aren't enough to knock down the Ministry, and I don't really want to, anyway. I don't want to be Minister. It was hard enough saving the world once."

Hermione nodded, as if she had fully anticipated that, her eyes rapt on him. "All right. Then _what_?"

"They're to get us an audience," Harry said quietly. "I was thinking of using Parseltongue to summon snakes, and I think I'll still have to do that, to hold back the Aurors and the others who would try to interfere with us. But we need to get inside the Ministry first, and stop the Aurors from killing us the minute they see us, and gather a large enough crowd that the Ministry can't just hush what we have to say up. We can't warn anyone that we're coming, though, or someone will leak it."

Hermione sat back and considered him doubtfully. "And all these forces are just to get you that far?"

"Yes," said Harry and Draco at the same time.

Hermione sighed as though she was doubtful about that, but nodded. "Then I can see the need for George and his pranks. What about your parents, Ron? I know Arthur might be loyal to the Ministry, and this could put his job in danger."

Harry turned and became aware that he was meeting both Ron and Draco's eyes, at the same time. He grinned at both of them, too. This was like the planning sessions he'd engaged in with his friends, before Draco came along.

_Except it's better now, because Draco is _here.


	2. Forging a Unit

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—Forging a Unit_

"You should have asked me for help a long time ago, you know."

George's voice was low and charged as he leaned across the table and gripped Harry's arm. He seemed to ignore utterly the fact that Draco was standing there, or maybe it didn't matter to him. He kept shaking his head at Harry, though, and his free hand tapped the top of the table as if the motion would soothe him. Or keep him from blurting out all the things that raced across his mind when it came to Harry.

Harry gave him a wan smile in return. If he could keep George at their side, then he would take the scolding.

"I could have helped you," George said again, leaning back in his chair and glancing around Cuthbert's Corner. The glance seemed to say that they would be staying in a better place by now if only they had admitted George to their confidence. "I could have made sure that you didn't get on so badly with the Ministry. Didn't have to run." He turned around and cast a dark little smile at Draco and Harry both. "It's wonderful what some of my jokes that tamper with the memory can do."

Harry raised his eyebrows at him. "And you think that would have attacked what we want to attack?"

George put a hand on his chest. "Harry, you wound me to the _heart. _What problem can't jokes solve?"

Draco shifted behind him, and Harry nodded his head, understanding the silent message. Draco wanted them to get on with things and stop wasting time in speaking about the past, which they couldn't change, or jokes that couldn't help turn the tide of the battle. "What did you bring with you?" Harry asked, leaning forwards in turn. "You keep saying that you could have done us so much good with jokes. Let's see some."

George stood up with a sly little grin in Draco's direction. "Does _he _want to see them, too? He keeps looking at me as though he'll hex me if I breathe wrong."

"The effects of long Auror training," Draco said with stiff formality, bowing to George. "I'm sorry that I look like that. But you must understand how tense we've been as the Ministry has hunted us."

Harry eyed Draco sideways, trying not to look amazed. He hadn't thought Draco was capable of that kind of restraint. But then again, he hadn't known George as well in school as Ron and Hermione. They were coming together on a different footing, Weasley and Malfoy rather than long-time enemies.

And if Draco didn't think of himself as a Malfoy anymore, as he'd hinted to Harry that he didn't, then even that footing was different. He might not be part of a family that had a blood feud with the Weasleys anymore.

"Thank you," George said, and pulled out something yellow and small from the satchel he'd tossed pretend-casually in the corner of the bedroom when Kreacher showed him in. "This is the first thing I brought."

Harry examined it from a safe distance. It looked as though it had a part that detached itself and flew, but he couldn't be sure what it was meant to do. From the way George winked at him, that was deliberate.

"It looks like a child's toy," George said, in the long, drawling voice that Harry suspected he used to convince reluctant clients to buy something. "But when you draw the string and speak a certain command word…" He pulled a tiny silver thread that hung down from the bottom of the toy and hissed something too soft for Harry to hear.

The top part did detach, and flew up. As Harry watched, it unfolded little feet, pronged ones, and wings. The insect hung between them near the ceiling, a mechanical wasp at least two inches long, and turned its head fiercely back and forth.

"It'll attack anyone at my command," George said fondly. He nodded at the stinger that extended down from the wasp's tail, something Harry suspected had been hidden inside the body of the toy. "Perfectly safe for children to menace each other with, of course. The command word isn't sold with the toy unless it's being used for something _special, _and it doesn't fly unless it hears the command word."

"And it isn't something that would be spoken in ordinary life?" Draco was eyeing the wasp as if he appreciated it and could see all the ways it could turn on its owners at the same time.

George shook his head and extended his hand. The wasp zipped down onto it. He touched the stinger, and it became even stiffer. George popped it back onto the top of the toy. "I should hope not, considering it's a bit of Parseltongue that dear Ronniekins taught me."

"You never said that Weasley was a Parselmouth, too." Draco stared at Harry.

Harry shook his head. "He knows how to imitate a few sounds of it, that's all." He grinned at George. "Pretty easy for someone to command in our camp, then?"

"That's what I thought." George set the wasp-toy gently down and took out something else. "Our friend here ought to recognize this. Or rather, what it used to be. Ordinary Peruvian Darkness Powder." He ignored the way that Draco tensed, turning the bag back and forth as if he was going to perform a magic trick with it. "It caused darkness when you flung it. But Ron and I decided that wasn't enough." He took a pinch of powder from the bag and deliberately turned away, blowing it at the far wall instead of at them—something that Harry, at least, appreciated. He noticed Draco covering his face, but Harry didn't, although he suspected the powder might be meant to go up their noses. He wanted to see what it did.

The powder caused a brief bloom of darkness to rise high into the air, crashing against the ceiling, and then Harry began to sneeze. It didn't feel as though something had gone up his nose; instead, it was as though someone had simply pressed down the button in his mind that commanded him to sneeze. He felt his body shaking, his shoulders shaking in time to his sneezes, and they were horrid and wet and he couldn't stop them. He reached for his wand, and it shook out of his hand and rolled across the floor. He saw George stroll forwards and reach down casually to pick it up in the seconds before the sneezes claimed all of his attention and he could no longer see anything.

At last it yielded. Harry sat up, shaking his head, unable to remember when he'd hit the floor. "Sneeze powder?" he asked, when George had held his wand out to him and he'd used it to clean himself up a bit and clear his glasses.

George nodded cheerfully. "It turned out to be simple to make," he said. "Not so simple to come up with a less powerful formula that wouldn't kill people." He frowned. "Not that we _did _kill anyone, but there were some test subjects that needed a few days in hospital before they were right again."

"And with these tricks, you propose to defeat the Ministry." Draco's voice was odd. Harry glanced quickly at him, ready to reassure Draco that he was all right if Draco needed it, but Draco was just standing there, staring at the patch of floor that was still covered with Harry's snot. Harry blushed and cleaned the rest of it up.

"Not defeat, from what Ron said." George answered Draco with calm normality, closing his bag of powder so that nothing could come out. Harry felt gingerly at his nose. It was still raw. "We were just going to find a way inside the building, and then keep people from leaving. Yeah, I think some of these wasps will do that."

"Some?" Draco widened his eyes.

"A swarm." George smiled. "I have them."

"And what will the powder do?" Draco folded his arms. "If people are too busy sneezing to listen to us, then we aren't any better off than we were before."

George's face twitched. Knowing him as well as he did, Harry thought he had barely resisted the temptation to stick his tongue out at Draco. "I only brought it along as an example," he said. "I think the wasps will be more useful. We don't have to use _them _or the powder, specifically, to open up the Ministry, though."

Draco looked as though he didn't have any more questions, and also as though he hated that. Harry pressed a hand on his shoulder and said to George, "Can you think of anyone else we could bring in, someone who would believe you rather than the lies the Ministry has been spreading about us?"

George paused and looked as though he was chewing over the potential consequences of that statement. "Not many," he said at last. "A few I would trust, but not with you and your secrets, Harry. Or with the safety of my brother and sister-in-law."

"Then we don't trust them," Draco said at once. "We can't take any risks that we'll fall into the hands of our enemies before we can launch the attack proper."

"_Not many _doesn't mean _not any_," George said, and rolled his eyes at Draco. "One of them may have already helped you a bit, in fact. He was contacted by a former Auror named Diane Athright, who wanted to know what he knew about a researcher named Jared Thacker. He's used to walking the edges of spells and magic, like me, that the Ministry wouldn't say were Dark but that they wouldn't want to exist. So I think it's safe to call on him."

"What's his name?" Harry asked, before Draco could say something that started the conversation off in another non-productive direction.

George smirked, which made Harry narrow his eyes. At least he knew right away why when George answered. "Nero Prince."

Draco stiffened. If he hadn't known Professor Snape's heritage during their sixth year, Harry thought, he did now.

"How close a relation?" Harry asked.

George shrugged. "Some kind of half-uncle or something of Eileen Prince. He's quite old, and he was cast out of his family for 'non-proper behavior,' which of course might have meant almost anything in those days." George sighed, his eyes distant for a second. "I have the impression that it was something _great, _though. So far, he won't tell me when I ask, but maybe someday, when he trusts me enough…"

Draco interrupted again. "He's been living in the Muggle world?" Harry reckoned that was the only way Draco would accept this Nero Prince being someone he'd never heard of before.

"Yes," George said. "Since he was kicked out of his family and burned off the tapestry, I think. He's not above slipping back into the wizarding world for a bit of fun, though." He grinned at Harry, more than Draco. "I think this qualifies."

Harry glanced at Draco, who met his eyes and flickered his own brows in a facial equivalent of a shrug. Harry nodded. "Go ahead and contact him." He thought that Draco might actually like working with someone else who was pure-blooded, despite the circumstances. They shared the experience of having to leave their families behind, if nothing else.

George stood up. "Then I'll go and send him an owl, and make sure that I bring more tricks with me next time." He glanced almost defiantly at Draco, but Draco said nothing against it. George shrugged and turned to Harry. "What about Ginny? Ron told me that you'd thought about bringing her in, but that there was some problem."

From the tone of his voice, it was clear that he thought the problem was Draco. Harry winced and met George's eyes as evenly as he could. "Ginny's been tangled with us enough. Possessed and used, and there was a question of whether one of her boyfriends had been a criminal. I think it's just as well to leave her out of this."

George gave him a funny little smile, but nodded and said, "All right." Then he left, already whistling in a way Harry recognized. It meant that mayhem was on the way, and George pitied all the people who wouldn't be able to get out of the way in time.

"Do you trust him?"

Harry leaned back in Draco embrace and turned his head so that his lips pressed against Draco's cheek. "Not to mention this little affair to Ginny, you mean? Yes, I do." He stroked Draco's hair. "Do _you _trust him enough to work with him?"

"Yes." Draco's body was still tense and unhappy against Harry's own, though, and Harry kissed him again, coaxingly enough that Draco relaxed a bit.

"What's wrong?" Harry whispered.

"You're bringing so many allies in, and I don't have anyone to _bring_," Draco said, after long enough that Harry thought the words might have clogged together in his throat and wouldn't let him speak. "Even if I dared to contact my old friends, most of them wouldn't see any potential for advancement in a rebellion against the Ministry. And a lot of them turned against me after I refused to say that Daphne was innocent, anyway."

Harry delicately touched the back of Draco's neck. He knew that Draco's fiancée had been arrested for murder not that long after they became betrothed. "You're enough by yourself," he whispered. "All your courage, and all your fierceness."

Draco shifted. Harry wondered if the problem was something else, and decided they might as well talk about it. Leaving things to fester did no good, as he had seen recently with the painful healing he'd had to give Draco after he tangled with a necromancy spell. "Or do you just feel uncomfortable working surrounded by Gryffindors?"

"No," Draco said. "If that was the case, I wouldn't have stayed in the Aurors this long." He paused, then added, "Besides, was Hagrid in Gryffindor? I thought it was Hufflepuff. Even the Gryffindors I know have more discretion than he does."

Harry swatted Draco on the back of the neck, and Draco sighed and lowered his head until his chin was touching Harry's shoulder. "I can't bring as much," he said. "So that means that I'll have to make up for it some other way, and add what only _I _can bring to this."

Harry smiled at him, feeling dazzled all over again by the way Draco looked, by the steely gleam in his eyes when he lifted his head. "You're worth the rest of your family all by yourself," he whispered, and relished the way Draco seemed to swell with power before his eyes before Harry kissed him.

* * *

The half-giant landed in front of Cuthbert's Corner the next day with an entire flight of thestrals, which Draco felt reinforced his point about discretion.

But Weasley stared at him when he brought up the point as they went outside to meet the bumbler, and pointed out, "It's not like most people will be able to see them. Unless they flew over a whole bunch of wizards who'd seen someone die. And I think they probably kept too high for that."

Draco bit the inside of his cheek and reached out a hand to the second thestral in line, behind the one that Hagrid rode, as he came up to the group of them. For a moment, the great creature arched its neck and stared at him, and Draco wondered if he'd been presumptuous and would be lucky to escape with his fingers. He hadn't always had the greatest relationship with beasts that honored Hagrid.

But a second later, the thestral snorted and lowered its head, letting its breath, which smelled of rotting meat, sweep Draco's palm. Draco smiled a little, feeling absurdly thrilled.

"He likes yeh!" Hagrid boomed out from behind him, making Draco tense all his muscles in an effort not to jump. "That's Carvenhoof, and he's pretty choosy." He didn't say anything else, but Draco thought he could read the judgment: Carvenhoof being choosy enough to pick Draco was a surprise.

Draco stepped closer instead of running away, the way he had half-wanted to when he first saw those staring white eyes and curving fangs. Carvenhoof lowered his head and sniffed at Draco's hair. Draco grimaced, but stood still. The stink of the thestral's breath was a lot worse close up.

Then Carvenhoof put his chin on Draco's shoulder.

Draco stood there, gaping a little, and wondering what he should do. No one else seemed to be saying anything, or moving forwards to rescue him. He thought that Hagrid might not have paid attention; at the moment, he was discussing something with Harry and laughing so hard that Draco winced.

But Carvenhoof remained where he was, eyes closed when Draco managed to turn his head to look at him. When he felt Draco looking, though, Carvenhoof turned to him again. He gazed calmly back, eerie with those blind white balls for eyes, but radiating a sort of solid strength that made Draco raise a hand to his mane.

It was bristly and largely hard under his touch, but even that made Draco want to bow his head. He had been feeling left out only yesterday, when he and Harry had spoken with yet another Weasley and he saw all the friends Harry had. He wasn't jealous, but he _was _envious. He wanted to bring something to the table, something other than his skills as an Auror, which Harry also had, or his flaw, which wasn't very useful except as a passive warning system.

Now he thought he had something—or at least something a thestral found attractive. Carvenhoof sniffed him thoroughly, his nostrils lingering in Draco's hair as though he wanted to be sure of knowing his scent if they met again. When he backed away and dropped his head to the ground, sniffing for the track of an animal, Draco had to smile.

"He likes yeh," Hagrid repeated from behind him, sounding wary. "Never seen him take to anybody that quick."

Draco turned around and smiled at Hagrid, who looked as if he was struggling to accept the fact that one of his treasured herd could like a Malfoy. Draco wondered for a moment if he _would _accept it. Perhaps he would have to hold the fact over Hagrid's head, at the price of having it held over his if he didn't.

But then Hagrid broke into a big smile, and held his hand out to Draco. "Knew there was some good in yeh," he said happily. "Knew Harry couldn't have taken up with someone who didn't have any."

Draco arched his eyebrow, but let Hagrid engulf his hand. As long as it didn't cause tension that might break their little group apart, then he was all right with this.

* * *

"The rumors have got worse." Hermione put down the _Daily Prophet _in front of Harry as though she was handling a Muggle bomb. "I don't…oh, Harry, no one can believe such bollocks. Can they?"

Harry shook his head a little as he picked up the paper. "People believe rumors all the time, Hermione. Even good and loyal people. Remember when Molly thought you were my girlfriend in fourth year?"

Hermione sighed and sat down in the chair across from him. "And I thought that was in the past," she muttered.

Harry raised an eyebrow at the headline, which said, _KIDNAPPED AURORS? _He skimmed down to the story underneath it, catching only glimpses of the sentences. That was okay. The _Daily Prophet _printed so much shit there was no point in reading all of it, anyway. You always had to wade through it and pick out the few good points.

_Or points that aren't good but tell you what they think, at least. _

The paper said, _Kidnapped Aurors…Aurors gone missing…Head Auror very grave…"We believe Potter and Malfoy might have something to do with our missing people"…"Yes, it's very hard, but we must keep our hopes up and wait for their possible return"…no Dark Arts beyond them…Socrates Corps…multiple murders…_

Harry laid it down and raised his eyes to Hermione, who was sitting with her hand over her mouth as though waiting for him to explode. "So they're saying that we're stealing Aurors and killing them with Dark Arts?" he asked.

Hermione nodded and slowly lowered her hand, then reached out to pick up the cup of tea Kreacher had brought, all the time keeping her eyes on him. "Yes. Or they're implying that you're converting them to your side with the Imperius Curse or something. I saw that brought up more than once. About how you used Unforgivable Curses during the war, and didn't regret it."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Of course they would say something like that. Once a mistake is made, it's never forgotten."

"Not if you're a political enemy of the Ministry." Draco stepped around his shoulder and dropped a kiss on the top of his head, nodding coolly at Hermione. "Good morning, Granger. Are you training with us this morning?"

"Training?" Hermione looked back and forth between them, and Harry realized that he'd forgotten to tell her.

"Yes," he said. "We're practicing with some of the tricks George brought, and the thestrals, to set up a plan as to how exactly we're going to break into the Ministry. And I think one of George's allies is going to show up this morning, and teach us some more." That was what George had said he'd heard from Nero Prince, at least. Harry was still a little tense about trusting the location of Cuthbert's Corner to someone else, but, come to that, they had only told Prince they would meet him on the cliffs in one particular location; the house would still be hidden by its wards.

"Yes," Hermione said, and all but bolted her tea. She stood up, glaring at the _Prophet _as if she wanted to incinerate it. "I want to _stop _this. I want to make them _yell_. To be sorry that they ever blamed my best friend." She looked at Harry, then hesitated, "And my best friend's—partner."

Draco gave a little bow to Hermione. "Thank you for including me, Granger." He sounded sincere, and Hermione gave him a small smile.

"Then we should start," Harry said, and swallowed the last of his own breakfast and stood up. The _Prophet _they left lying in the middle of the table like the rag it was. As far as Harry was concerned, Kreacher could use it to wipe his arse.

They had training to accomplish.


	3. Training

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—Training_

"When I give yeh the signal," Hagrid said, giving Harry such a stern look that Harry had to duck his head and nod a little. Hagrid had the right to be stern about that, he thought. After all, the only time Harry had ridden thestrals before this was when they had gone on that strictly illegal jaunt to the Ministry to rescue Sirius.

Even thinking about that didn't give Harry as much pain as it could. Sirius hadn't survived, but Harry had, and he thought Sirius would be proud of what he was doing now: resisting the same Ministry who had cast Sirius into prison without a trial.

Draco sat calm and proud at his side, on the thestral, Carvenhoof, who seemed to have taken a liking to him. Harry was glad to see that. Draco needed someone _besides _Harry who wanted to be with him.

Carvenhoof was that. The minute Draco had come out to walk towards the thestral herd gathered on top of the cliffs, Carvenhoof had called to him, with a sound that was a weird cross between a lamb's bleat and a horse's neigh. And maybe with a little of bat in it, too, Harry thought. It was the only vocal noise that he remembered hearing a thestral make.

Draco had stood with his hand on Carvenhoof's neck for a second, patting him, before he swung onto his back. Now he looked more relaxed even as he sat like he had been training for this his entire life. Well, he probably had, Harry thought. He was sure that the Malfoys had given Draco lessons in riding winged horses just like rich Muggle families gave their children riding lessons on ordinary horses.

"Harry?"

Harry started and turned guiltily back to Hagrid, who wagged a finger at him. "That's jest the reason so many people fall off the first time," Hagrid said. "Not paying _attention_."

"Sorry," Harry murmured, and took a grip on the stiff, bristly mane of the thestral he rode. It rolled one blank white eye at him, but didn't seem inclined to protest other than that, which Harry was glad of. He had no idea what he would have done if it _had _protested.

"Now," Hagrid said, and climbed on the leader of the herd, the biggest stallion Harry had ever seen, whose hipbones stuck out further than Hagrid was wide—barely. "The ones that don't have riders are going to circle around us and dive at the people who're going to be firing curses at yeh. You ride in the middle and cast the spells. Only to hold them back, not to hurt." He looked at Harry again as if to make sure that he was paying attention to the words _he _had told Hagrid about earlier.

Harry nodded and opened his mouth, but Draco interrupted. "What good will the other thestrals diving do?" he asked. "Most of the people they're attacking won't be able to see them."

Hagrid grinned wickedly. "All the better. Imagine somethin' invisible diving at yeh from above and scraping its hoofs through yer hair."

Draco blinked and fell silent, looking as though he was sorry he'd asked. Harry held back his snicker. Draco was riding a thestral, and still was disturbed by their battle tactics.

"Anyone have any questions?" Hagrid looked around, but Ron and Hermione both shook their heads and tightened their holds on the necks of their thestrals. Harry noticed how white around the mouth Hermione looked, but both of them had wanted to ride. "Then we're goin' to _lift_."

Hagrid whistled to the lead thestral, and it spread its wings. Harry felt the tension in the bony back of the one beneath him change.

Then the lead stallion sprang and lofted into the air, seeming to lift _with _rather than struggle against Hagrid's weight, and Harry's came right behind.

Harry rocked a little before he caught his breath and his weight; it was nothing like riding a broom. The strength of it, the power beneath him, the flapping wings to either side of him, all made it seem as though the air had grown a mind of its own.

_This is what it might be like to ride the wind, _he thought, a few seconds before his thestral turned in grim pursuit of Hagrid's, and he realized that the earth and the sky were _both _wheeling beneath him and he had no idea how to put them back into proper perspective.

A laugh made him turn his head. Draco was sliding through the air beside him on the back of his own chosen mount. Carvenhoof looked as though he was trotting daintily through a meadow. His head was up and his hooves moved against the air, although Harry couldn't see the point when they weren't touching anything.

Carvenhoof seemed to catch the thought, because he tossed Harry a severe look.

Harry swallowed and turned his attention back to controlling his own thestral, which was the important thing at the moment. The creature flew and surged and straightened and now and then ducked down, and Harry figured out, slowly, that it was due to signals the lead thestral gave. When he flicked his tail to the right or left, the flight would turn in that direction. Going higher or lower would make them do it, too, and various twitches of his wings were code for them to switch positions or fly faster or slower.

Harry was sure that Hagrid had taught the leader those signals for the ease of anyone else riding with him. The regular thestrals wouldn't need them, of course, for when they needed to find their way in the flight.

Then Hagrid held up his hand and gave a single wordless bellow that actually wasn't much different from the cry that Carvenhoof had uttered earlier.

The effect, though, was _completely _different. The herd of thestrals parted, skimming out to the sides as though someone had carved the air down the middle of them with a knife. Their flight paths seemed to slope higher and steeper than ever, and their wings rustled in unison now. Harry gasped as the back beneath him seemed to get narrower, and then realized his thestral was tilting. He still flew beside Draco, but now there was a steadily widening gap of air between them.

Draco gave him an eloquent look. Harry snorted and tried to sit up straight. He reminded himself, again, that the thestral wouldn't put him in danger. It might not care for him the way Carvenhoof obviously did for Draco, but it wouldn't want to disobey Hagrid by dropping him, either.

_That doesn't mean it might not happen by accident._

Harry did his best to relax the grip of both his legs and his hands, to sit up straight, and to breathe normally. He hadn't realized how much of his flying on a broom was graceful because _he was in control. _He could ride all the crazy loops and the dodges at the ground and the insane rules of Quidditch because he had confidence in his muscles and his magical core and whatever else you needed to ride a broom.

To ride a thestral, it was becoming obvious, you needed grace, and patience. Harry didn't think he'd had much of either during their wild flight to the Ministry years ago. Desperation could make up for a lot of things, though.

Hagrid bellowed again, and moved his right hand in a wide circle.

At least Harry was better-prepared this time; Hagrid had warned them about this particular maneuver. The flight parted further, forming the twin halves of a twisting circle instead of a cleft straight line. They peeled away from each other, but each of them still had a partner in the other line.

Harry caught Draco's wild eye and wilder grin, and grinned back when he realized they were still across from each other.

Then they dived.

The neatness of the line was lost in whirling chaos, or at least it seemed so to Harry. He saw manes blowing past him, heard screams and shrieks as the thestrals who didn't have riders let their pleasure or their excitement or their anger out, and leaned back against the pull of gravity. He shivered as sweat and tears and wind tore out of his eyes. His hands were growing numb with the sheer force he was fighting to put on them, _not _to clutch at his mount's withers.

The thestrals wheeled around a few meters above the ground, about where human heads would be on most of their targets, Harry thought. He could hear the wings and the whicker of hooves striking, drawing back and coiling and coming down again. He shivered, hoping Hagrid would tell them to be a little less lethal when they actually got to the Ministry. The thestrals would kill a whole bunch of people who couldn't even see them to defend against them, otherwise.

Hagrid stuck out his left hand, and the flight joined up again, in a V formation for a little while before they fell back into a straight line. Harry turned his head to look for Ron and Hermione.

Hermione's whole face was white, at this point, but she still clung gamely to the mane of her mount, for all that she shivered. Ron was grinning like Draco was, and wriggling back and forth on the thestral's spine, all but whooping.

Harry snorted. _I wonder if he found a thestral that likes him, too._

Hagrid swirled his arm again, and all the thestrals headed back to the ground. Harry found himself sighing in relief. He was glad that Draco had found something he liked and was good at, and he still trusted Hagrid, but his skin prickled all over and his hands were cold when he touched one to his face.

_We'll have to hope the Ministry doesn't kill us before the excitement does._

He landed, and immediately found himself sagging against his thestral, gripping the lanky neck for balance and swearing softly. Hagrid laughed at him and strode over to clap him on the shoulder. Behind him, the lead stallion was already aloft again and chasing small birds.

"It takes yeh like that the first couple times, ridin' one does!" Hagrid all but chirped, and shook Harry a little. "Yeh look like yer about to fall over, Harry! I thought yeh were a better flyer than that!"

Harry could only smile weakly back at him, and at Draco, who stood at a distance with the same sort of self-satisfied smile on his face. "When I'm on a broom," was all he said.

Hagrid just nodded, apparently satisfied with that answer, and turned to check on Ron and Hermione. He didn't say anything to Draco, and Harry didn't think it was because he didn't like Draco. Hagrid had to know from the way Draco stood, one casual hand still on Carvenhoof's neck, that Draco didn't need any help.

"That wasn't a broom," Harry said, when Draco didn't say anything, seeming engaged in admiring the shine of his thestral's flank instead.

"No shit," Draco said, and laughed, and Harry's heart soared. As much as he might be bothered by his own inability to be a good flyer on a thestral, it was _wonderful _to hear Draco that way, bright and happy.

"You did well, though," Harry said.

Draco nodded, still smiling. Harry thought he could probably tell from the tone of Harry's voice that Harry didn't resent him for being better on a thestral. One more stupid argument they could avoid.

"That was amazing."

The voice was one Harry didn't know, and that, more than anything, had him whipping around and reaching for his wand. Draco stepped up to him at once and put his hand on Harry's arm before he could ruin everything by striking, though.

"I think this is someone we've been waiting for," Draco said, and smiled at the tall man, his hooked nose and dark brown hair and dirty teeth and all. "Nero Prince?"

"Delighted to meet someone who recognizes me," Prince said, and stuck out a hand. "Even if that mostly comes from my young relative and not me."

* * *

Draco shook Prince's hand, carefully, evaluating him. He was obviously not Professor Snape. He was older than Professor Snape had ever lived to be, and Draco would be willing to bet that it was a charm, not nature, keeping his hair brown. He talked too loudly and smiled too much.

But Draco could see some similarities there, too, if he looked for them, and not just in the nose. There was the intelligence in his eyes, and the way he appeared to watch everything around them.

Although he smiled when the prankster Weasley came up, which Draco thought _still _meant he smiled too much. Draco could put up with that, though, as long as this man could do half of what Weasley had promised them.

"Did you know Professor Snape?" Draco had to ask. He hadn't learned much of Snape's background until after he was dead, but it was hard to misunderstand the bitterness in the tug of his mouth whenever he talked about family.

Prince looked at him and shrugged. "I didn't have the honor when he was alive," he said. "I learned that he was a hero when he was dead, and I think he deserved it." He waited a moment, then added, "I mean that he deserved to be a hero, not that he deserved death."

Draco relaxed his shoulders a little and nodded back. He would have to watch his reactions to Prince, he thought. The man wasn't Professor Snape, and Draco would have to be wary about his own attempts to make him into a replacement.

"Welcome, anyway," Harry said. Prince turned and half-watched him, but seemed to keep most of his attention on Draco. Draco wondered why. Did he have some prejudices in favor of pure-bloods after all, despite hiding in the Muggle world? "George said that you have some good pranks. What are they?"

Draco hid a smile when Prince blinked. _So we have things that he'll have to get used to, too._

"I wouldn't call them pranks so much as _tricks_," Prince said, when he'd recovered his breath. "I can show you, though." He turned and walked back to a basket sitting on the ground that Draco hadn't consciously noticed until that point. He touched the lid with his wand and murmured something, making a green flash surround him for a second.

Draco blinked and shook his head hard. No, the green flash hadn't been _Avada Kedavra. _Weasley was watching him gleefully, but Draco was sure he would have mentioned it if his colleague could survive the Killing Curse.

At least a glance at Harry showed he was startled by the color, too. Draco moved a little closer to him and waited.

Prince stood up and turned around cradling what looked like a set of juggling balls in his hands. Draco arched his eyebrows. They were made of metal, and the sides, or at least a few of the sides, looked as though they were hinged, too. Draco wondered what they did.

Useless to wonder, though, when Prince tossed them into the air and demonstrated for them.

The balls flew up, and hovered there. Two of them halved, the sides of the spheres rotating neatly apart from each other, and reminding Draco of the way the thestrals had parted at the half-giant's command. Then the halves flew away, humming like Snitches. One of them soared into the distance. The others circled towards the sky, the thestral herd, and Prince's shoulder. Prince petted the one that had landed on his shoulder as though it was made of feathers and not metal.

"These are my spy-globes," he explained. "The ones that fly away look at something for me, and they're very fast and can't be caught."

_Except by an experienced Seeker, maybe, _Draco thought, but the chance that they would be facing opponents on brooms was remote.

"For example," Prince said, his eyes closed as he let his hand rest on the half of a ball on his shoulder, "I can tell that there's a large wave coming in to the cliffs right now. That your lead thestral has just caught his bird. That there's a parasite crawling on the shoulder of the tall pregnant thestral mare." He opened his eyes and smiled. "Not very useful at the moment, but you can see how it would be in battle."

"Can I try them?" Draco asked. He didn't know how the globes worked, although he thought he could take a guess at some of the magical theory. But he wanted to experience the reality for himself.

Prince wordlessly handed over the half of a sphere. Draco arranged it on his shoulder, laid his hand flat on it the way Prince had, and closed his eyes.

The impressions that immediately crowded into his mind almost overwhelmed him. A second later, though, the sphere seemed to realize that, and the images dimmed and retreated until Draco was seeing them hovering in a rough triangle in front of him.

One was of the sea rippling out from the cliffs, flat and grey for the most part, with the silver curl of a wave coming in, just as Prince had said. The other was of feathers spiraling down, and the lead stallion returning in a leisurely fashion to earth, his mouth covered with blood. And the third one now showed the pregnant mare standing with her face uplifted to the sun, wings quivering. Draco thought he could make out the shadow of a hoof against the side of her belly.

Draco let the sphere go, and blinked. He could see why Prince closed his eyes when he was communing with the images. It would be overwhelming otherwise.

"That is amazing," he said, and Prince, who had been watching him as intently as though he expected Draco to disapprove, relaxed and smiled at him.

"Yes, it is rather," he said casually, and reached out to pluck the half-sphere from Draco's shoulder. "It's not the only one of my tricks, but it's the best one."

"Show them the hummingbird." George nudged Prince in the ribs with an elbow.

"I don't know if I should." Prince made a show out of looking around. "Even such unrepentant rebels as they are might feel a duty to report me to the Ministry!"

Weasley—the other one, not the one who stood beside Prince—laughed. Draco rolled his eyes. Of course _he _would think a joke like that was funny.

Then he realized Harry was laughing, too, and that probably meant Draco couldn't feel as smugly superior as he wanted to.

"Take it out and show them," George said, and patted Prince on the shoulder that the sphere-half had sat on. Prince reached up and whistled, and the sphere-halves that still hovered in the air came back to him.

"All right," he said, bending down to tuck the spheres back into his basket.

Draco caught Harry's eye and raised his eyebrows for a second. Harry had looked wistful, as though he wanted and didn't want, at the same time, to say something about the spheres. But he shook his head when he saw Draco watching, and Draco reached out and caught his hand, squeezing it.

"Since Mr. Malfoy got to demonstrate my last toy, I think it's only fair that you get to demonstrate this one," Prince said, and held out what looked like a golden hummingbird on a chain to Harry. Draco squinted. The hummingbird was made of metal, but probably not pure gold, which would be more expensive than Prince could afford. The wings were lifted up, the tail spread as though wind was passing through the feathers. It was a lovely little thing, but Draco didn't see how it could possibly be an offensive weapon.

Which was probably the point, he had to admit.

"What do I do? Is there a command word?" Harry took the chain and held the bird up in front of him as if he thought it would fly off on its own.

Prince shook his head. "But it does require some of your blood. Do you mind that?"

Granger did, if the appalled grimace that crossed her face was any indication. But Draco didn't think that she had a vote here. Hell, if she thought about it, she would realize that Harry had done worse things than this, including using Darker magic, in pursuit of those twisted that they had both hunted.

"No," Harry said, sure enough, and turned the bird on Prince's instructions and sliced the edge of the wing across the tip of his finger.

Harry grimaced only a moment after his blood coated the wing, and Draco nodded. It probably hadn't even hurt at first. The hummingbird's wing looked that sharp.

The red color flooded down the hummingbird, staining it, enlivening it. After a few seconds it looked even more like a living bird, with a ruby-colored throat and glinting eyes. It lifted his head, glanced around, and zoomed off the chain, leaving that to dangle in Harry's fingers. It looped back and forth, flying around Harry's head.

"Now command it to attack something," Prince said comfortably.

Harry grinned, and Draco knew what he would say before he said it. He didn't stop Harry, though. Everyone should be allowed to have some fun, and Prince had had too much of it already.

"Why don't you show me what you can do against a certain Nero Prince?" he called to the hummingbird.

Draco wondered for a moment if the thing would recognize such an unorthodox command, but it seemed it did. The wings fluttered, the head turned, and the hummingbird swooped at Prince. Its beak was thrust out ahead of it, a deadly sting, and its wings weren't much weaker.

Prince swore and ducked, and the hummingbird missed on its first swing. But it turned and came back even faster than the spheres had done. Draco was smiling in spite of himself, although not quite to the point of the Weasleys' guffaws or Harry's delighted laughter. Prince had made his little weapon in the shape of a hummingbird for a reason, but that made it all the harder to beat when it was turned against him.

The hummingbird did catch him in the side this time, with a quick stab that parted Prince's robes and made some blood run down his ribs. A nick, though, no more than that, and Prince was still smiling as he fell back a step and held up his hands.

"I surrender!" he called.

The hummingbird came to a dead stop in midair, watched Prince as if considering whether he meant it, and then flew back and rejoined the chain in Harry's hand so fast that Draco never saw the moment when the delicate little links connected up with its back again. Harry shook it back and forth, and both he and Draco watched as the red flush faded.

"Does your opponent have to say they surrender?" Harry asked, looking up. "Or will any method of giving up do?"

"Losing their wand is the usual signal," Prince said. "I just responded with the words to show you they work, too." He folded his arms and beamed smugly around at them all. "Well. Am I competent enough to be included?"

From the gleam in Harry's eyes, Draco knew the answer before he said it, but he nodded along with everyone else.

"Well." Prince's face had softened some, and he looked unabashedly triumphant. "Well, now. That might discomfit the Ministry."

_It will, _Draco thought, turning to look at the thestrals, _along with everything else. And they'll deserve every last bit of it._


	4. Wheeling

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Four—Wheeling_

"You think this is going to work?"

Harry didn't roll his eyes, but it was hard. Hermione had brought up some good flaws with their plans, including the one that Hagrid had had of simply attacking the Ministry immediately with the thestrals and Prince's toys. He saw no need to wait when they were already so strong. He'd listened to Hermione argue against it, though.

But usually Hermione brought up the flaws in a plan _before _they actually engaged in it.

"Yes," Harry said. "Or, at least, I think it's possible that it will. Now be quiet, or they might hear us, Silencing Charms or not."

Hermione clamped her teeth shut. Harry thought he could hear them grinding over her tongue. He hoped she wouldn't hurt herself, but on the other hand, if she did, he didn't see what he could do about it. She should have brought up whether this was going to work or not, and all the flaws she could see in it, before they left Cuthbert's Corner.

So far, there was no movement across the street behind the wards that covered Grimmauld Place. Muggles wandered up and down the street, but not many, since it was the middle of the day and the vast majority of them were either in work or at school. Harry knew Aurors had taken his house over only because there had been a _Prophet _story yesterday about the Ministry seizing "important Dark artifacts that belonged to the former Chosen One," and this was the only source of them that Harry could think of.

Of course, the _Prophet _didn't always tell the truth, but this article had contained names he recognized, and the Ministry had specified one or two artifacts that Harry definitely didn't have in his house, and Draco said he didn't have either. That meant Grimmauld.

"I _don't _understand what we're doing here, though," Hermione said. At least her voice was low this time, and she didn't seem compelled to shout their presence under a Disillusionment Charm across from the house to the whole neighborhood. "You immediately said that we had to come here and do something, but how can we? What are we supposed to do?"

Harry bared his teeth, and said nothing. Yes, he appreciated Hermione. He kept telling himself that no matter how many times his heart jumped or his teeth ground against each other, and he thought he was probably wearing a whole layer of enamel off. She was his best friend. She had saved his life more times than even Ron. It mattered. It was important. She was an asset to them specifically for this bluntness and her ability to speak about things that other people might not dare to.

"Harry?"

"I told you before we left the house," Harry breathed. He kept his voice down to a gentle monotone, and didn't take his eyes off Number Twelve. "I want to try and take some of the Aurors prisoner. We can either use Imperius on them to make them obey us, or we can use some other spell to get information out of them. Either way, they're separated from the rest of the Ministry right now. This is our best chance to learn things that we otherwise can't know."

"No one said _anything _about Unforgiveables!"

Harry turned around and stared at Hermione. Something had to have happened to her that was important enough to make her ignore words he _knew_ she had heard, and that meant it was important enough to make him take his eyes off the house.

"Draco did," he said. "And he also told you all about the Dark Arts that we used on the twisted while we were Socrates Aurors. And so did I. Hermione, what's wrong? Why are you pretending that this is something we shouldn't be doing? We have some allies in the Ministry, yes, but it's dangerous for them to contact us. We should exploit that avenue only when we're absolutely ready to start the assault on the Ministry."

Hermione closed her eyes and bowed her head. "It's real," she whispered.

"What?"

She made a little hushing motion at him with one hand, and Harry obediently fell silent. She had come this far to support him; he could wait and give her the time to sort out what was going on in her head. And if anyone could, it was Hermione.

"It was just about helping you," Hermione whispered at last, looking up. "When your letter came. Knowing that you had been unjustly accused and we were going to your aid. But—we didn't know that we would end up in the middle of this mess. Dark Arts and thestrals and someone with jokes that are a lot more dangerous than George's. And now Unforgivables."

"Does Ron feel the same way?" Harry asked, his heart slowly starting to pick up speed. He hadn't thought a lot about what his friends would _feel_ when he contacted them. He only wanted to know they would come to support him, and they had.

Hermione bowed her head down. "I don't know. I haven't talked to him about it. I only just realized it myself. I want to help you, but I don't want to hurt anyone at the Ministry. I don't want to use Dark Arts on someone."

"Or stand by while someone else does it?" Harry asked, deciding that was the real source of her conflict. She had to know that neither Harry nor Draco would have asked _her _to curse someone.

She hesitated, and Harry gave her a small smile. "It's okay. You can say it."

"If I stood by and didn't try to stop someone else from using Dark Arts, then I would be just as culpable," Hermione said at last, raising her head. "Provided that I knew about it."

Harry nodded. "But we have. And we plan to go on using them. It's partially because the Ministry gave us permission to use them and we got used to it, but it's also because we want to protect ourselves and win this contest. Make no mistake, Hermione. We can blame the Ministry for a lot, but not for us using Dark Arts now. And we won't stop using them."

For a moment, Hermione's lip quivered. Then she said, "You would choose the Dark Arts over our friendship?"

Harry reached out and clutched her hand, and let her feel in that moment how much he wanted her there, how much he would give to hold her to his side. "We're choosing survival," he whispered. "I want you fighting at my side, you and Ron both. But I can't do anything if you won't let me use the only weapons we have. Besides, the Ministry is using Dark Arts all the time. How can you step back and let _them _do what you think is wrong?"

"Fighting fire with fire is wrong," Hermione said stubbornly. "Fighting Dark Arts with Dark Arts is wrong."

Harry closed his eyes. He hated to do this, but he would bring up the past if he had to make a point with a stubborn Draco, and the same point applied with Hermione. "Then what about during the war? Were we wrong to use them then?"

Hermione's breath stuttered for a second. Harry could almost feel her leaning around the corner in front of them, studying Grimmauld Place and trying to figure out a distraction, maybe a Muggle coming close to the house.

If she said that one of the Aurors was coming out, Harry thought, he would let it go. It would mean that she was committed to helping him at least as far as reporting on the movements of their enemies. He would _like _to let it go. He would like to put all the debates aside for later and try to just—be happy.

Well, and alert and active in battle. But rejoicing in having his friends back beside him, not fearing them.

Hermione finally whispered, "We did what we had to do then. We were so much younger, and we didn't have any help."

Harry laughed, but managed to muffle it before the sound could explode past their Disillusionment Charm and warn any wards that the Aurors might have on the house, or any Muggles. "You think we have more now? We have George, and Prince, and Hagrid and the thestrals. Not counting the thestrals, that's still only seven _people._ You think the situation is less desperate than it was during the war?"

"Yes," Hermione said, her voice unexpectedly strong. "Yes, I do. The whole of Britain won't go down under the reign of a Dark Lord if we fail." She turned to face him, and Harry opened his eyes to find her regarding him solemnly. "You know that, right? You're not thinking that this conflict is the same as the war?"

Harry thought about that, and then finally answered, "Not for most people. But for Draco and me. You know what the Ministry said in that last article. They're going to execute us if they find us."

Hermione turned pale. "I thought that was exaggeration along with all the rest," she whispered, but Harry could see her mind racing. She would be thinking about the other articles the _Prophet _had printed, and drawing comparisons, and realizing that they had been moving in this direction all along.

"No," Harry said, and clutched her hand harder. "The Ministry could survive if we lost, and most of the people in the British wizarding world. But Draco and I won't, and our allies probably won't, and the Ministry could go on hunting twisted, or creating them, for as long as it liked. Trying to get rid of its mistakes. Being protected from any consequences. Is that really what you want, Hermione?"

Hermione's eyes went back to the front of Number Twelve, and then they hardened as Harry watched them. It was the look that she had worn many times when they were on the run in the Horcrux hunt, and he held his breath, hoping it meant that she would agree to the spells that Draco and Harry wanted.

"Let me try," Hermione whispered. "Let me try to use Light spells. If I can't, then you can use what you need to."

Harry hesitated, but ended up nodding. He trusted Hermione in the way that Draco couldn't. He'd been with her in so many bad situations, and seen so many times what her brains could do. "What's your plan?"

Hermione smiled at him. "To go over there and knock on the door."

And she stood up and dropped the Disillusionment Charm.

* * *

"I don't understand why Hermione and I couldn't be together, and you and Harry couldn't be partners."

"Believe me, that's the way I would have preferred it, too," Draco muttered darkly as he slithered over the stones towards the cave they'd finally found. Warren and Jenkins had risked at least their careers and maybe their lives to get them the information, but even with precise Apparition coordinates, it still wasn't easy to find the cave behind the tumbled rocks that blocked the path leading up to it. "But there had to be someone in each group who would agree to using Dark Arts." He looked at Weasley and raised his eyebrow. "And somehow, I don't think that would have been you."

Weasley scowled. "I'm more practical than Hermione. I'll do what we have to."

"But you think that most of the time, it doesn't need to involve Dark Arts, right?" Draco waved a dismissive hand as Weasley opened his mouth. "Never mind telling me what you think. I already know."

Weasley said something harsher than Draco deserved under his breath.

"Be quiet now," Draco said, and faced forwards again, smiling a little. It felt _good _to irritate Weasley, and on an issue that he couldn't retort over. Harry would probably say that it was childish, but Draco had held his tongue, had bitten it, and done everything he could to hold his temper, too. It wasn't his fault if Weasley tried it.

Weasley gave one more grumble behind him, but pressed his lips together and shook his head when Draco whipped around to glare at him. Draco sneered and faced forwards again. Perhaps Weasley would stop being such a pain in the arse when he saw what they had come here to find.

Draco leaped over one more piece of stone, and then stood listening. He'd thought he'd heard a shuffle from within the cave, and right now, that was enough to give him pause.

Then he heard more than a shuffle, and a beam of red light came flying towards them.

Draco leaped back—and into Weasley, who had placed himself in the most inconvenient position, right behind Draco's left shoulder, as if he had never been a trained Auror at all. Draco hissed as they spilled to the ground, and shook his head. He had hit it on the side of the rough ravine that led towards the mouth of the cave, and at the worst possible moment, just like Weasley was the worst possible partner. He shook it sharply again, as his vision blurred.

"What kind of Dark wizard only uses a Stunner to hit someone?" Weasley complained, directly into his ear. "I don't believe that we were in that much danger after all."

"That wasn't a Stunner," Draco said sharply, as the shadow by the mouth of the cave moved and the wizard limped into sight. "That was the twisted's flaw." He bit his lip on the lecture on how Weasley should have been able to tell from the _color _of the bloody spell that that wasn't a Stunner. Now wasn't the time.

Weasley scrambled up and stood with his eyes fastened on the form of the ragged wizard they had come to seek. "Bloody hell…" he whispered, frozen in the posture of extending one hand down to Draco to help him to his feet.

Draco took the chance to stand up on his own, before Weasley could get any more bright ideas about helping him. He knew what they had come to find, what Warren and Jenkins had told them about the latest twisted they had been assigned to hunt as the only currently active members of the Socrates Corps, and he still felt as though a real Stunner had hit him.

The wizard looked as though he had escaped from Azkaban. His beard was ragged and trailed almost to his feet, but for some reason only scraggly patches of hair clung near his ears. Maybe he had been scraping the hair higher up off. Given what Draco knew about the demented wizard, it wouldn't be unusual. The hair on his head was equally filthy and matted, and clung to his neck like the mane of a lion, except it barely moved when he did. He was missing all but a few teeth, and they dangled awkwardly from spotted gums.

As Draco watched, appalled, a sharp cackle exploded out of the wizard's mouth. He dropped to all fours and began creeping towards them while making snapping sounds with his jaws.

"How can he be so powerful and still act mental?" Weasley whispered, as the trailing beard caught in one of the wizard's hands and he paused to pick fretfully at it.

"Watch _out_," Draco snapped in response, and it was his chance to shove Weasley out of the way on purpose as a shape leaped down from the side of the ravine above them.

It landed in front of the crawling wizard and turned around to snarl at them. Hooked claws, which left deep, scored impressions in the rocks as it walked, Draco noted, trying to catalogue all the horrible features that didn't give them much of a chance quickly. A spiky mane of its own, this one standing _out _from its neck. Its body was big and shambling, not moving with cat-like grace, but given those claws and the flames that rushed into being on its back and filled the air with heat, it didn't need it.

Draco flicked his eyes to the side to acknowledge the second beast that had leaped to stand on the other side. Blocked by the narrowness of the gully from coming close to them while the crawling wizard and the first beast were there, it paced back and forth instead, its mane flaring out from its neck, its claws leaving marks that made tiny flakes and scraps of stone tumble down to the floor.

"What the fuck are _those _things?" Weasley said. He was backing up towards Draco now, panting like the Hogwarts Express and clutching at his wand as if he had no idea what to do with it.

"His companions," Draco said. "This man is a twisted. I told you that. Try to keep up."

The wizard opened his mouth and cackled, and the fire-lion in front of him crouched down and flexed its claws. Once again, stone broke, and the lion settled more heavily into place. It didn't seem to matter to it. Draco thought a leap could carry it up to at least the ground between Draco and Weasley, and it would probably be more than able to tear them apart.

And all the time, they had to dodge thrown spells from a man who could send them into comas they would never wake up from, at least if the information that Jenkins and Warren had passed along to them was accurate—and it seemed to be accurate so far about the man's state of mind and his companions.

"Shield Charm above us, Weasley," Draco told the other man softly over his shoulder. "As strong as you can make it."

"You think I can block one of those things if it leaps?" Weasley muttered, but raised his wand. Draco circled over to the other side from the beast, one eye on the wizard, one eye on the companion that watched them hungrily from the edge of the ravine.

"You'll have to try," Draco said, but his words were lost as the thing beside the twisted unfolded and leaped towards them, soaring from above with a long, hollow roar.

Weasley's Shield Charm snapped into place, then began to crack and sag under the beast's weight. But it held, and the fire-lion slid towards the ground, paws still flailing and claws still shooting out as if it could tear the air the way it had the stone.

Meanwhile, Draco had whirled to the side and shot the Killing Curse at the second lion as it leaped. The Unforgivable was powerful enough magic that he thought he could probably get through whatever supernatural defenses the creature might have, and his suspicion was proved true when the bloody thing spasmed, twitching all over and all through its body, and then slid down to a limp stop a few feet from the wizard's head. The wizard turned around with a cry of dismay.

_So he's sane enough to realize what it means when one of his companions dies, _Draco thought. That was going to be important, if they were to use him for Draco's plan.

Draco darted forwards and grabbed the man's arm, Stunning him with a quick spell. The man slumped over, and the fire-lion turned towards Draco, flickering.

"Malfoy!" Weasley hollered.

"It's all right," Draco said, standing there with a coolness he didn't feel and clutching the wizard's hair despite the way his skin crawled. "The witnesses Warren and Jenkins interviewed were very clear about this."

Still, it took more effort than he would have thought to stand there until the slinking fire-lion paused, flickered, and abruptly went out like a candle. Draco sighed and released the man's arm. Weasley promptly scrambled over to scoop the wizard up and add his own Stunner and _Incarcerous _ropes to Draco's. He cast that spell better than even Harry could, Draco noted with some surprise.

"Let me guess," Weasley said. "His companions disappear when he goes unconscious?"

Draco nodded. "The witnesses were clear about that. One of them got lucky and hit him with a Stunner, and after the lions disappeared, they were able to get away."

Weasley grunted. "Well, he looks pretty bloody insane. I hope that this plan works out the way you want it to."

Draco flicked his eyebrows at him as he bent to scoop the man up on a conjured stretcher. "So do I, Weasley."

* * *

Harry didn't have the chance to catch Hermione's robe before she walked away from their hiding place and up to the front door, and he wasn't sure it wouldn't have done more harm than good, anyway. It would have revealed his hiding place, and he had to remain hidden because _someone _would have to rescue Hermione when her plan went horribly wrong.

As it would have to. Harry was faint with thinking what might happen. He remained still, clutching his wand.

Hermione knocked on the door. There was a long pause, perhaps Aurors arguing about whether it was a Muggle or someone from the Ministry, and then a man Harry didn't recognize opened the door. He was tall enough to loom over Hermione, and frown down at her. Harry shifted his wand. At least he should have a clear shot if the man tried to hurt Hermione.

"I'm sorry to bother you," Hermione said, in a sweet voice Harry hadn't heard since Hogwarts, when she wanted to charm a professor. "But I found a wand lying in the street, and I think it might be one of yours." She pulled out her own wand and offered it on her palm.

The Auror bent over to look. As he did, Hermione twisted, and suddenly she had him in a complicated headlock and her wand to the hollow of his throat. His groans and Hermione's words were clearly audible to Harry, watching her from across the street.

"Tell the others to come here. You're going to Stun them for me, or I'll use the Killing Curse. You'd better believe I can, too."

Harry stared, with his jaw dropping in admiration. Well, and horror. He didn't think Hermione would get away with that, especially if one of the Aurors had recognized her. They would think she was too much of a respected citizen, basically, to make the threat and keep it, and they would call her bluff.

But after a long pause, the Auror called the others in a croaking whisper, and Stunned them as they came up. Hermione stood there with the wand in place, and nodded grimly every time one fell to the floor. Finally, there were no more Aurors inside the house, or so it seemed, and the one Hermione held rolled his eyes at her in appeal.

Hermione stepped back and managed a credible picture of someone considering whether it would be the done thing to use the Killing Curse after all, then snapped her hand out. The Auror was unconscious before he hit the ground.

Harry waited until he was sure there were no Muggles around, and then trotted across the street, clapping loudly. Hermione turned around, flushed, and raised a Screening Charm, a temporary ward, across the front of the house so that no one could see them.

"I wasn't sure I would get away with that," she whispered, as she bent down and began to collect the bodies.

Harry glanced at her from the corner of his eye, seeing the way her face was a little damp with sweat and fear, and the pallor in her cheeks. "I didn't think you would, either," he murmured. "What made them fall for it? Couldn't they hear and see what was going on at the front door?"

Hermione smiled a bit grimly. "They were all gathered further back in the house, warding the windows and the other doors. I think they thought I was a distraction, and the Auror who came to meet me might have been the sacrifice. But when he told them I needed to show them all a wand, then they started coming. The last few did try to run once they saw the bodies lying on the floor, but he was a pretty good spellcaster." She looked down at the Auror she'd held captive. "Do you know him?"

"No, but I will soon," Harry said, and began to bind them. "Good work, Hermione."

She flashed him a defiant look. "There's always a way around using the Unforgivables, if you really look for it."

Harry decided it was in his best interests to say nothing right now, and they continued binding the wizards without incident.


	5. Hard Evidence

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Five—Hard Evidence_

"Remind me again why we captured—them."

Draco sighed. He really didn't fancy explaining himself to Weasley again, but he supposed that Weasley also wasn't used to seeing Aurors in cages. After the experience he and Harry had had at Grimmauld Place, and then before that with capturing the Montgomerys when they tried the ritual to render Harry helpless, Draco was comfortable with it now.

"Warren and Jenkins—you do know who they are?" he added over his shoulder to Weasley as he led him into the room where they were keeping the prisoners. It was a large study that Ernhardt had probably used for experiments. The major advantage it possessed was the utterly blank walls, plus the solid floor. There was no way to drill through the stone or escape through a secret passage, at least not without a wand.

And Draco had made sure that all the Aurors Granger and Harry had brought in were unarmed, without so much as the tiny knife that some of them carried to slit open envelopes, before he had put them into their cells.

He and Weasley became the target of glares the second they stepped into the room. Draco ignored the curses that flew his way, and walked over to the large cage set apart from the others. They had constructed the cages just by conjuring bars from floor to ceiling. A small hinged door sat in the front of each one, for passing food through.

Draco crouched and studied the twisted he and Weasley had captured. He had remained in a deep sleep, aided by more Stunners and then the Draught of Living Death, since they had taken him. Draco set the covered bowl and the vial he carried on the ground and opened his wand to unlock the hinged door.

"Going to torture someone, Malfoy?" howled an Auror from a cell down the way. "I hope that you don't think I'll be that quiet when it's _my _turn!"

Weasley flinched and ducked. Draco kept himself from sighing with a force of will he hadn't known he possessed. "They're not even talking to you, they're talking to me," he said as he broke through the intricate warding spells, courtesy of another invention of Prince's that disguised itself as an ordinary bar in the cage. "Ignore them. You're the free one, and they're the ones that are caged."

"That's what bothers me."

Draco turned around and stared at him. Weasley avoided his gaze, staring steadfastly at the floor. Draco sighed, shook his head, and nodded at the dish as he picked up the vial. "Lift that. Not with your wand," he added, as he saw Weasley about to draw. "You might spill it."

Weasley gave a long-suffering sigh and picked up the dish. At least being able to be irritated at Draco seemed to have cured him of the tendency to lament about captive Aurors. "Yes, I'm familiar with Warren and Jenkins from Harry telling me about them. What do they have to do with this?"

"They're the Aurors assigned to pursue him." Draco lowered his voice. They would _Obliviate _the other captives later as necessary, but he preferred not to have to do it without good reason. Keeping their conversation down would prevent them from exposing Warren and Jenkins to harm. "This particular twisted." He touched the filthy hair on the wizard's head and pulled his hand back, grimacing. It felt as though it was covered in slime, though Draco knew it was probably just dirt.

"So _what_?" That was Weasley's favorite expression, going by how many times he'd uttered it over the last few days. He dusted his hands and sat back, glaring at Draco. "That doesn't mean that we're going to kill him in their place, not the way you've treated him so far."

Draco curled his lip in some amusement. That was more clever than he had expected Weasley to be. "No. But they found a note in his file that led them to believe that he might be one of the twisted the Ministry _made, _by experimenting on them."

Weasley smothered a sound that could have been a word or a curse, and stared at the man. Draco uncorked the vial and peered at the liquid inside. He had brewed it himself from instructions found in a book here, and trusted the book more than the seemingly identical potions he'd discovered hidden behind the wall in Ernhardt's lab. But he had never used this before, and there was no harm in checking the color one more time.

"Why would anyone want to be or look like _that_?" Weasley whispered. "Why would anyone want to have the power to put their enemies into a coma?"

Draco glared at him over his shoulder. "You really don't understand that last part?"

"Oh, excuse me," Weasley muttered. "I should have remembered the bloke was probably a Slytherin, and that's a sane desire for _you_ lot."

With an effort of breathing, Draco kept his temper. They couldn't afford any quarrels tearing their little band apart. "The altar the Ministry used probably made him into this. They didn't plan on the companions, I think. They were playing with Dark magic they didn't understand. It was supposed to give the people they experimented on wandless magic, but it did far more than that."

He decided, finally, that the potion was as close to the color of "a ruby's heart" as he would get, and prepared to tip it. At the same time, he lifted his wand and murmured the incantation that dispelled the Draught of Living Death from the man's blood.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Weasley hissed.

Since they had gone over the plan right before they came into the room, Draco ignored him. He had enough to deal with, as the man's eyes snapped open and he turned his head to regard Draco, widening his mouth for what would probably be a scream. Red light from his flaw was already crackling around his fingers.

Draco snapped, "Hold him!"

Weasley did what he was supposed to, finally, and cast a Sticking Charm that bound their screaming, hissing "friend" to the floor. Draco leaned over and poured the red potion down his throat. It slid out of the vial more thickly and slowly than Draco had guessed, as if it really were made of the liquid rubies that it looked like, and dripped into the man's mouth as Weasley strained and struggled to hold it open.

The potion almost went on the floor as the man turned his head away, but another Sticking Charm solved that problem. Draco knew the other Aurors were leaning forwards from their cages, trying desperately to get a glimpse, but he ignored them. None of them were twisted, so none of them would get this treatment.

When he reached down to massage the man's throat and make him swallow, filthy teeth snapped at his hand. Draco conjured a gag, conquering his urge to snatch his hand out of reach. The screams that promptly came out when the gag settled into the imbecile's mouth were at least muffled by it.

"Now what we do we do?" Weasley was shifting behind him, his hands clasped in front of him.

"Now we wait," Draco said, distant. He knew that Weasley didn't really want to be here with him, but Harry and Granger were training with the thestrals this morning—they were still the two riders who struggled the most—and Prince and Weasley's brother had left to work on more tricks. That left the two people this really needed.

For a minute, two, time ran by and there was no change in the twisted. Draco narrowed his eyes. He _knew _he had brewed the potion perfectly, but perhaps the instructions in the book had been mad, even though they seemed to agree perfectly with the potions theory Draco understood. There was no indication that Ernhardt had been sane when he wrote it, after all.

Then the screams behind the gag cut off. The man shook his head and shut his eyes. Draco raised an eyebrow and Vanished the gag, but signaled Weasley to keep the Sticking Charms in place. They didn't know how much of his sanity the potion had given back this man. He might retain enough to plan, but not enough to realize that they were trying to help him.

"Where am I?" whispered the twisted.

That was at least promising. Draco cleared his throat, waiting until the man opened his eyes and looked up. They were clearer than they had been, which meant without the flickering haze that had haunted and glazed them until now. "You're in the custody of friends," he said. "Friends working against the Ministry that twisted you. Do you remember the ceremony where they put you on the altar?"

He was taking a risk—after all, Warren and Jenkins only _suspected _that this was one of the twisted made by the Ministry, they didn't _know_—but when the man's eyes darkened with anger, Draco had to smile. _Yes. Galleons in the bank._

"I remember," the man whispered, and began to struggle so hard to sit up that Draco gestured to Weasley to release the Sticking Charms. Weasley hesitated, but Draco didn't see why. Draco was the one who was sitting close to the bloke, after all, and the one who would get the first brunt of his fists if he chose to hit out at something.

Finally, the charms dissipated, and the man sat up and gaped at Draco, his tongue lolling out like a snake's. Draco ignored that. He had done some of the same things himself, when he was under the control of Healer Alto. "My name is—is Jeremiah," said the man.

That wasn't what the file Warren and Jenkins possessed had said, but the file had _also _said that it was impossible to bring the twisted back from insanity and that he should be killed immediately. That emphasis was another thing to attract suspicion. Of course the Socrates Corps had license to kill all twisted, and this man wasn't as dangerous as some of the others they had faced. Why make it a point to kill him at once?

_Before he could talk, _Draco thought, and looked the man in the eyes again. "We can call you that. Tell us what you remember."

For some reason, Jeremiah's face clouded, and he worked his hands together. "You look like an Auror. Are _you _going to let me have my revenge on the Ministry?"

Draco didn't look away from him as he nodded. "Yes. The Ministry accused us of treason and murder when we did our best to protect them, and now we want to destroy them. It sounds like you have reason to hate them, too."

Jeremiah grinned at him. If he noticed the smell of his own hair and skin, he didn't comment on it, although Draco heard Weasley gag from behind him. "_Good_," he snarled through his yellowing teeth. "This is the way it happened. I wanted the power to make people sleep as easily and naturally as possible while I Healed them."

"You're a Healer?" Draco asked. That might make it easier to find records for him, although the Ministry had enough contacts with St. Mungo's that they could have tracked them down and destroyed them.

Jeremiah looked at his arm for a second. Draco looked, too, and saw a small, intricate symbol like a tattoo near the corner of his elbow. The symbol that twisted had, the equivalent of Voldemort's Dark Mark, he supposed.

"Was," Jeremiah whispered.

Draco couldn't bring himself to squeeze that dirty shoulder in compassion, but he nodded. "So you agreed to this experiment because you thought good would come out of it."

Jeremiah bobbed his head hard enough that Draco wondered if it was possible for your neck to grow more flexible during the period when you were a twisted. He didn't remember much about his own exposure, but the physical sensations and memories were so blurred and shifting that he supposed he could have undergone something similar and not remembered it.

"I thought that I would be able to bring relief with a touch, so we didn't have to wait for Dreamless Sleep," Jeremiah whispered. "We were always running out of it in hospital. People suffered who didn't _have _to." He jerked his head up to look at Draco. "I wanted to be as fierce as fire for them. As fierce as a lion."

"Gryffindor?" Weasley asked, leaning over Draco's shoulder and showing an interest in the conversation for the first time.

Jeremiah looked up at him and nodded urgently again. Draco snorted a little. That might explain why his companions took the form of lions, at least outwardly. "I wanted to help," he whispered. "I never knew that they would do something like this."

"Did you know they would use Dark magic?" Draco asked, moving on to the next important point. They wanted to use Jeremiah as a witness against the Ministry, but it would compromise him a little if he had knowingly agreed to a crime.

Jeremiah shook his head, though. "They told me that they had a ritual that would work with Dark magic, and I refused. Then they told me they had figured out a way to do it without using Dark Arts. That was the only reason I agreed." Tears were spilling out of his eyes and washing down his cheeks, carving little pale paths in the grime there. "They lied to me. They stole months of my _life_."

Draco wanted to get up and dance. He forced himself to crouch there instead and ask in a voice as calm as possible, "They did this to you only months ago?" He had thought the Ministry had mostly stopped creating twisted at least a year prior.

Then again, his mother's experience had been relatively recent.

Jeremiah nodded. "They said—they said it was safe. They said it was going to be all right, and that I would have the power to soothe patients the way I wanted to." He went still and tense, suddenly, staring towards the door of the room, beyond the cage bars. "I'll bloody kill them," he whispered.

Draco reached for his wand, but Weasley was the one who stretched his hand out and shook his head a little. "Come on, mate," he said. "What good can you do right now?"

"I can raid the Ministry," Jeremiah said. "With my companions." He looked around as though he expected the fire-lions to leap into view from nothingness. Which they might, Draco thought, as long as he was awake, and kept a sharp eye out for signs of it. "You could come along if you wanted, though."

"We do plan to expose the Ministry," Draco said gravely, and bit his lip to avoid laughing. The thought of this ragged man charging the doors of the Ministry and expecting to be admitted inside, or to win the ensuing battle, had to prompt amusement.

Of course, he hadn't done badly with his companions against Draco and Weasley in the ravine, and that was something Draco promised himself that he would remember. But that wasn't the same as confronting a full squadron of battle-trained Aurors, the same kind that Draco expected to confront them when they arrived at the Ministry.

The solution, of course, was to try and get some of them out of the way beforehand. Draco regretted that it wouldn't be as simple as locking _all _of them up in these cages the way they had already locked up the ones they captured, but they would have to live with that.

"You'll take me along?" Jeremiah leaned forwards as if he intended to overpower Draco into agreeing by his smell.

Draco didn't wrinkle his nose, but only because he was working as hard as he could on holding his breath. He nodded, exhaled, and turned to Weasley. "Why don't you talk to him about what part he could play?" he asked. "I'll bring you a Pensieve, and he can start putting his memories into it."

Weasley narrowed his eyes at him. No doubt he thought Draco was getting off easily. But Draco only nodded to him and tapped his wand once, conjuring the hourglass of the _Tempus _Charm. It was less a way to see what the time was than to remind Weasley that the potion to make Jeremiah sane would last an hour, and extracting the memories would take considerably less time than that.

"What's going to happen to me?"

Draco, getting up with his hand on the door of the cage, turned around and looked at Jeremiah. If he hadn't deigned to pay much attention to the dirt and stink that covered him yet, Draco decided, he must know about it. He sat with his hands folded on his legs now, as if trying to cover himself up from even his own gaze, and his eyes hadn't wavered from Draco.

"I gave you a potion that restored your wits," Draco said quietly. "But you're still insane, and the potion will wear off. We have to take your memories of the ritual and then put you back to sleep. But we're working on a way to restore your sanity permanently." Now that they had the altar that the Ministry had used to create the twisted in the first place, Draco thought it would be much easier than otherwise.

"I'm afraid," Jeremiah said, simply.

Weasley reached out and patted him clumsily on the shoulder. "You'll get through it," he whispered. "You were a Gryffindor."

That seemed to be all the simpleton needed to grin with broken teeth. Draco half-rolled his eyes, and stepped around a grasping hand from the cages that held the Aurors, which tried to trip him. He would fetch the Pensieve, and he would leave it with Weasley so that he could collect Jeremiah's memories.

In the meantime, he had a partner to talk to.

* * *

"Now yeh get it, Harry!"

Harry dashed drops of sweat from his forehead and smiled at Hagrid. He had been turning corners for hours, and it felt as though his body still wanted to lean and follow the impulse of the last flight, but he managed to contain himself and stand still on the ground. He had to brace himself against a thestral, but at the least the stallion he had ridden ignored him, munching the scraps of mostly raw meat that Hagrid had thrown him.

"I don't know how I rode so well when I was fifteen and I can't ride well at all now," he said. "I must have been _mad_."

Hagrid nodded, and laid a finger alongside his nose. "Verry likely yeh were," he said. "Thestrals respond to that, y'know. The madness in a rider. How much the rider is like them. How much death they've seen." He looked pale for a second, and Harry took a step forwards, worried for him, but in the next instant Hagrid plucked himself up and shook his head with a smile. "But now you're learning the other way, by education instead of instinct."

"Where are you getting all the food for them from, Hagrid?" Hermione was asking. She had watched the meat thrown without a word, but she turned to face Hagrid now, and planted her hands on her hips in a familiar gesture that made Harry want to back away. He stayed near Hagrid out of solidarity more than anything else. "I know thestrals need meat, but in the Forest, they can hunt it for themselves. Where is it coming from now?"

Hagrid chuckled. Harry relaxed a little. He had been afraid they were in for another of Hagrid's rambling confessions that wasn't a confession, trying to talk around something horrible. Harry had been a bit worried that the meat might come from pet dogs and cats that belonged to Muggles. "Yeh don't need to worry about _that_. They went hunting in the Forest before we came, and I cut up the meat and had the house-elves preserve it. The house-elves gave me some of the meat that Hogwarts gets, too. It's enough for them to last a while longer yet!"

Hermione dropped her hands back to her sides and gave Hagrid a look that was so unexpected it took Harry a second to interpret it: an approving one. "You thought ahead, Hagrid," she said. "I'm very proud of you."

Hagrid winked at her. "Maxime's influence," he said happily. "She wanted me to do a lot of things before I left, and she was right."

Hermione muttered something Harry couldn't hear, and then glanced up as Draco appeared out of the warded door of Cuthbert's Corner. He caught Harry's eye and nodded to him, speaking to him alone, Harry thought. Hermione and Hagrid could consider themselves included in it by courtesy only. Harry would have rolled his eyes, but by now it was Draco's way, and objecting to it would only make Draco try harder at making himself obnoxious. "We used the potion that was supposed to make twisted sane, and it worked. He says his name is Jeremiah, and he was a Healer. He wanted to have the ability to touch his patients and send them into a healing sleep."

"And it went wrong," Hermione murmured, her eyes alive. Harry smiled. She might not like Dark magic, but for the chance to reverse Dark magic, he thought, she would show herself all eagerness. "Let me talk to him. There might be a way I can help." She pushed past Draco and into the house.

Harry raised his eyebrows. It wouldn't hurt Ron to have help with Jeremiah, but… "You already gave Ron the Pensieve?"

Draco nodded. "He agreed to allow us to use his memories to support his testimony. It'll be better if we can make him sane and have him there to say it himself, but if necessary, we have this."

"Yeh can use memories against the Ministry?"

Harry glanced at Hagrid and spoke before Draco could. The tone of patient resignation in Draco's voice was as likely to set Hagrid off as if it was to provide the explanation. "Yes. That's what we'll mostly use. Memories of what people have told us about twisted and the way the Ministry made them—"

Hagrid was pursuing another tack, though. "What about memories of the thestrals and the things the Ministry have done to _them_?" he asked, patting the flank of the lead stallion who stood beside him. It made a noise like a hollow drum. "Yeh ought to be fighting for _them, _too! They're fighting for _yer _lot."

Harry winced a little and ignored the way that Draco leaned towards him, touching his wand. No, cursing Hagrid wasn't the solution. "We're just trying to expose the twisted and the way they made us hunt them down even though they were the ones who created a lot of them, Hagrid," he said gently. "The thestrals deserve to have someone fight for them, but it would confuse people if we were trying to combine two causes."

"But the thestrals can show that the Ministry used Dark Arts!"

Harry blinked. He hadn't expected that. "How?"

"That bloke you mentioned to me," Hagrid said. "The Ernhardt bloke. He had a place in the Forest where he did experiments."

Harry felt Draco take a step forwards next to him, staring. He didn't look at Draco, but did reach out and put his hand on Hagrid's arm. "You mean…"

Hagrid nodded fiercely. "He was torturing the lil' baby thestrals," he said, his eyes gleaming intensely. "I found his name and his _brand _on some of them." Hagrid let out a growl that reminded Harry, as few things except his size did anymore, that he was half-giant. "I wanted to git 'em, but he left before I could. I have memories. Lots of memories."

Harry could see Draco smiling out of the corner of his eye, and thought it might be the first time Draco had ever smiled at Hagrid like that in the course of his life. Well, it made _sense. _They had a lot of proof of other things, but not as much as they'd like of the fact that Ernhardt actually had been a twisted and not the innocent the Ministry had accused them of killing.

Now, it seemed, they might find it.


	6. The Challenge

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Six—The Challenge_

"You're sure that you want to watch this, Granger?"

Harry nearly inhaled his breakfast, and then had to cough desperately and reach for a glass of water to soothe further coughs. Draco didn't understand anything about Hermione if he thought that she would stay behind with a challenge like that in front of her.

"I was going to watch Harry use the Unforgivables on a bunch of Aurors," Hermione said coolly, without glancing up from the latest edition of the _Prophet. _Harry had given up on reading it, since it only ever printed lies, but Hermione insisted on knowing the twists and turns of the story so that she could counter them when they went to the Ministry. "I think I can handle watching some memories of someone becoming a twisted."

"Even someone we have in a cage upstairs?" Draco came to put his elbows on the back of Harry's chair. Harry reached up and felt the tension in his shoulder. He sighed, caressing Draco's muscles. Draco quivered, but didn't look away from Hermione.

Hermione looked up and eyed Draco for a second, before she asked, "Why are you asking this, Malfoy? Is it because I'm the only woman here? Or because you're closer to Ron now that he's helped you with a few things?" She shook her head, hair rustling over her shoulders and eyes so cold that Harry felt Draco flinch. "No. I know that the memories have happened, and there's nothing I can do to change the past. I can change the future, though. If we use Jeremiah's testimony to help bring down the corrupt members of the Ministry, then that's all I ask. And I'm going to be there for that."

She turned back to her newspaper. Harry glanced up and pressed on Draco's shoulder again. Draco shut his mouth with a click and moved back.

"I just thought I would give you the chance, that's all," he muttered, and began scooping up his own breakfast from the mound of food Kreacher had prepared.

Harry rolled his eyes. He thought Draco's motive had actually been to get Hermione to stay behind so that he wouldn't have to be with her in the Pensieve memories, but once again, he had gone about it completely the wrong way.

Draco glared at him over his shoulder. Harry glared back, and Draco shut his mouth and flopped heavily into his seat, scowling.

"I know some different ways to do things," Hermione said, without looking up from her paper. "That doesn't mean they're _inferior _ways."

Harry snickered. Draco buried himself in his food and didn't say anything until they were standing up, ready to go to the Pensieve upstairs and lose themselves in the memories of Jeremiah becoming a twisted. Then he looked at Harry and muttered, "Maybe I should have asked if _you _didn't want to watch. I know your saving-people thing. Maybe it would be overstimulated."

Harry stared at Draco. A second later, he understood. "There's no shame in not watching," he said. "If you don't want to."

Hermione was there, and Harry thought later that was unfortunate; maybe Draco could have backed down and admitted that he didn't really want to look at those memories if they didn't have an audience. But he wasn't about to do it in front of a Gryffindor, someone who was used to thinking that a Slytherin was the embodiment of cowardice. He swallowed with an audible click, but shook his head. "I'm not afraid."

"I didn't say you were," Harry began, but the words faded away as Draco turned and began to climb the stairs.

"I don't envy you the possession of him, really," Hermione said thoughtfully before she followed Draco.

_Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one with any good sense, _Harry decided, as he brought up the rear. _And considering how many times I've felt like I'm reckless, that's really not a good sign._

* * *

Draco concealed his scowl by keeping his head down as they assembled around the Pensieve holding Jeremiah's memories. Since six of them—all except the half-giant, who was assembling his own memories of Ernhardt—were going to be viewing them, they had put the Pensieve on a stone platform that had once been used for cauldrons. Draco glanced at the potions stains on the sides of the platform and hoped none of them would interfere with the operation of the Pensieve.

_Or is that that you wish they _would _interfere?_

Draco grimaced this time, and concealed that by looking away, too. Harry had touched nearer to the matter than he knew. Draco didn't fear what they would see in Jeremiah's memories so much for themselves as for the reminders they would bring up.

Reminders of his mother.

It was all well and good for Harry to say that Draco was rid of his parents now and didn't have to spend any more time thinking about them. Sure, he didn't have to think of them anymore if he wanted to forget most of his _life _and the way he had grown up. But this wasn't as easy as that. Here, he knew that he would look, in spite of himself, for clues that the ritual resembled the one Narcissa had undergone hoping to gain control of Parseltongue.

"Ready?" Harry asked, and when everyone nodded—bar Draco, but Harry had caught his eye anyway—they tilted their heads down and placed them into the Pensieve as one.

There was the dizzying, disorienting fall that Draco had always hated, and they stood in the middle of a dark cavern. Draco frowned. Then he saw bookshelves out of the corner of his eye, and relaxed a little. This was in one of the Ministry archives, then, or maybe a place in the Department of Mysteries. At least it was good that it was under the Ministry, instead of elsewhere. It would be much harder to prove the altar's connection to the Ministry if it was elsewhere.

Granger turned and walked towards the shelves. Draco would have felt good about that if it wasn't obvious that she was only checking on the titles, maybe for themselves, maybe in hopes of identifying the room later.

In the meantime…

A harsh groan sounded from in front of them. Draco turned around to watch what they had come to see, braced for it.

Or so he thought. It turned out that seeing a human being bound to an altar of white stone, his limbs spread out with chains and someone leaning over him with a wand dripping blood, still wasn't an easy sight to face. Draco clapped a hand over his mouth and bit down, hard, on the center of his palm.

The slight pain helped to calm him. He had endured that. And as Granger had said, Jeremiah had already endured this. They could help him most by watching what had happened and understanding it, so they could explain to their audience at the Ministry exactly how evil it was.

The person with the blood on his wand was an Auror Draco knew slightly, one of those in Heliodorus Corps, named Andrew Hapton. He was tall and thick and round-shouldered, but he chanted with dedication, keeping his eyes on Jeremiah's screwed-up face as if that would tell him when the pain was enough.

Or maybe he was looking for some other signal, because he took an abrupt step backwards and flicked his wand, sending the blood on it in a high arc. From the way the blood splattered down over Jeremiah's face and the altar, though, Draco was sure the gesture was planned. The pattern formed a notched arrow, pointing straight up the altar and to Jeremiah's forehead, between the eyes.

Hapton chanted something else, his eyes closed and his head tilted back, and then his hand reached out and closed on the air over Jeremiah's face. He began to draw it back, grunting, his shoulders bulging, as though he pulled on an invisible cord.

And Jeremiah's face began to crack apart.

Draco shuddered, but made himself watch. Harry reached out and gripped his hand beside him, and Draco nodded his thanks. He didn't even care if Granger and Weasley saw. There were some things that _should _be hard to watch, and seeing someone nearly have his face torn off was one of them.

The broken pieces of Jeremiah's cheeks and nose writhed and dipped together as they danced above his head, like a mask that someone was tearing into shreds with invisible hands. Then they settled back into place, and Jeremiah turned his head and opened his eyes.

Draco caught his breath. He hadn't noticed before, but the features that Jeremiah had worn as he lay on the altar weren't precisely the ones that he had worn in the cage. Now, though, he looked like the man they had captured, minus only the ragged, matted filth of hair.

_It's no wonder that that file Warren and Jenkins had had some confusion about his name._

Hapton moved back and examined Jeremiah from a distance. Then he conferred with a couple others who came forwards. They were in Unspeakable robes, Draco saw, with some satisfaction, and they kept their hoods pulled forwards so that Draco couldn't see their faces, although he saw Granger sneaking close and looking up to try if she could catch a glimpse.

The Unspeakables gave Hapton orders that seemed to consist entirely of gestures. Hapton nodded and turned back, raising cage bars around the altar with a spell similar to the ones that Draco had used to make the prison upstairs. Then Hapton strode around to the head of the altar and spoke to Jeremiah. "Come on. Wake up, now."

Jeremiah was already awake, to Draco's eyes, but at the words, he turned his head around and focused on Hapton. Hapton nodded encouragingly to him. "You wanted to be able to put people to sleep," he murmured. "Can you do that now?"

Jeremiah looked at the Auror, and then down at his own hand. A second later, his fingers rose, aiming. Hapton, maybe from the Auror instincts he had been neglecting up until now, obviously realized it was a good idea to duck aside, and did so. The red beam of Jeremiah's flaw struck over his head and hit someone in the background, who immediately slumped to the floor.

Draco smiled grimly. He supposed that he knew where some of the detailed information in Warren and Jenkins's file had come from.

There was chaos a second later, as Jeremiah chattered something in a language that made sense only to him, and fire-lions manifested to either side of him, looking more like real lions than the beasts that Draco and Weasley had seen in the ravine. The Unspeakables spat curses and tried to strengthen the bars, but it was too late. The first fire-lion had already sprung forwards and melted them. The cage collapsed, and the fire-lions ran out into the middle of the cellar, heading for the door. Jeremiah staggered along behind them, aiming his hand and casting the red light of his flaw at anyone who tried to get in the way.

One Unspeakable shouted something Draco couldn't make out over the noise. He saw Granger's face tighten, though. The second one who had come up to give Hapton orders responded, and this bit, Draco did hear. "Why do all of them always go _insane_?"

_Maybe because you're bloody well using Dark magic to make them, you idiot, and you just rearranged his face, _Draco thought grimly.

The crackling of the red light and the flames on the fire-lions made the cellar bright with radiance, but only for a little while. Then Jeremiah raced up the steps and out of there, and the Pensieve swirled around them and the memory ended.

Draco caught his balance with hands on the edge of the Pensieve, breathing hard. At least he wasn't the only one doing that, or who looked ill.

"That was enlightening," said Granger, her voice so quiet that Draco wasn't sure he'd heard her at first.

Harry looked up and nodded, his expression calm and grim. "Why did they—why did they take apart his face like that?" he asked. His hand was on his wand, as if he could have interfered in the memory. Draco knew the feeling. "It didn't seem to have anything to do with giving him healing power."

"That's because they're doing it wrong," Draco said. He had suspected it before, from what his mother had told him about the ritual that had changed her into a twisted, but he knew it now. He nodded as Harry turned around to look at him. "They—they can't use Dark Arts to give someone a gift. You could make a sacrifice to do it, or you could make a potion, or you could try to go to one of the places where pure magic lingers and ask for it as a blessing. You can't do it the way they're doing it."

Granger, of course, with her interest in magical theory, was the one who pounced on it first, though Draco saw that Prince had a thoughtful look on his face and decided he might have jumped in if Granger hadn't. "But I'm sure I heard something about sacrifices in a lot of Dark Arts rituals. And why wouldn't they do it those other ways, if it would be surer? I thought these people who became twisted really wanted the wandless magic."

"They did," Draco murmured, thinking of his mother and her political motivations for trying to become a Parselmouth. "But they get impatient. They decide that they might as well take a risk, and try to become—well, not twisted, but gifted, through a ritual. They decide it would be faster."

"That still doesn't answer my question about his face," Harry muttered.

Prince spoke up then. "Mr. Malfoy is right, as far as he goes, but more than impatience went into that ritual. I think they were becoming desperate and trying to add to the ritual to come up with a new result. If they made him into a new person, the reasoning probably went, then he would have new power. And that twisting of his face was one way to make him into a new person." Prince was smiling, but tightly, and looked as if he wished he could gag. "They didn't think it through."

"Plus there's the altar itself," Draco added. Speaking about explanations, theory, in a way that didn't touch the practical aspects of what they had just witnessed, was a means to shield himself, he had found. "That's had Dark Arts practiced on it for generations, probably long past the time when it should have been destroyed. The Dark magic lingers there. Dark magic's _hungry_. It wants new power poured into it, the same rituals performed. When those rituals aren't, or when the Ministry tries to change them, the Dark magic—it's not sentient, so it can't take revenge, but that's what it amounts to. It tries to change their rituals into the ones it's familiar with. This is the result."

Prince nodded. "I think you are right. That was a complex collision of old and new ritual magic, and it's no wonder that the result was a mess." He shuddered. "What did they think they were _doing _with the blood they splashed across his body? Trying to create a pattern that they could build off, essentially, but of course the new blood from the tearing of his face mingled with it…"

"Is the evidence going to be convincing enough to an audience consisting of people who hate us?" Harry asked. His face was a little green. Draco knew it wasn't cowardice as much as nausea, but he was glad that he wasn't the only one disgusted by what they had witnessed.

"I would think so." Prince's voice was low and vicious, his eyes shining. "What do you think, George?"

"I think so." The Weasley—the other Weasley, as Draco still sometimes thought of him—stood there with his arms folded as though to protect himself against the cold, but his eyes were so bright that they could have matched Prince's. "I think the evidence is very _interesting, _and the fact that you can see some faces clearly just makes it better." He looked at Draco. "Did you recognize that Auror who was casting the spell? I thought I saw you gape at him."

Draco ignored the temptation to say that he had never done anything so undignified as _gaping. _The last thing they needed at the moment was to get into a pissing contest about definitions. "I did," he said. "His name is Andrew Hapton."

"And I recognized the lead Unspeakable." Granger's voice was so low that Draco didn't recognize it at first. "I didn't know he was an Unspeakable, though. He's testified at some of the committee meetings I set up, arguing that house-elves need to remain servants because of some mystical reasons that I always suspected him of inventing on the spot." Granger gave a harsh smile that made Draco like her a little more. "It seems that he at least _has _conducted some of those experiments he was always babbling about."

"What's his name?" Weasley, the original one, his voice low. He put his arm around Granger's shoulders. Only then did Draco remember they were married. He shook his head. He supposed there was someone for everyone out there, but it was strange to think about for people like they had been at Hogwarts.

"Orlando Furioso." Granger sighed the name as though it hurt her, and clenched her hands in front of her. "I wonder how many house-elves he's had under his wand?" Then she seemed to think of something, and turned to Prince. "But why did they keep performing the rituals once they realized they weren't working? Why not give up and try some other method of giving people wandless magic?"

Prince shrugged a little and looked at Draco and Harry. "Perhaps someone who understands the inner workings of the Ministry during the last decade can answer that better than I can. I would have used myself for the experiment, and done it _properly, _with all the length of time it was meant to take."

"I think I can answer that."

Draco almost wondered if he was speaking himself without meaning to, and then he realized the words had come from Harry. He turned to his partner, and found that he was green in the face again. At least Draco didn't think it was from immediate nausea this time.

"Harry?" Granger asked, an invitation to explain.

Draco wrapped his arm around Harry's shoulders in silence. Just because Weasley did it to Granger didn't make it a useless gesture, and Harry looked like he could use the support right now.

* * *

_I can't believe I never made the connection._

In fairness to his younger self, though, Harry had to admit that he'd been a brash young Auror, still working with Ron, still fighting the press, and not concerned with the inner workings of the Department the way he would become later, when they gave him a partner he despised. He hadn't thought anything of the weird request at the time. He got all kinds of weird requests, from petitions to donate parts of his body for Potions ingredients to marriage proposals that would involve him marrying half the witches in Britain at once, so they could all be satisfied.

"An Unspeakable asked me to be part of a ritual," Harry murmured. "That was right after I had the first vision of someone being murdered. I didn't think anything of it. Just that they wanted to study my ability. I told them no, and I did it well enough that they shut up and didn't contact me again. But…they said something about an altar. I wonder now if they were hoping to find out how _my _wandless magic worked so that they could duplicate it in someone else."

"And they let you go because you were the Chosen One and people would have noticed if you disappeared," Draco said, nodding. "Yes, it wouldn't surprise me. What year was that?"

Harry hesitated, thinking about it. It would have been two years before Ron left, which meant… "Five years ago now."

Draco smiled grimly. "So they were performing the experiments then, too. I wonder if they've _stopped, _in the last few decades? Except during the war, I suppose. The Death Eaters might not have let them have the time or the victims then."

"I think they would," Hermione murmured, looking sick. "Furioso was charged as a collaborator. He said that he was acting as a secret spy on the Death Eaters and passing information on to the resistance, and they _were _getting information from inside the Ministry at one point. They couldn't prove that it was Furioso who gave that to them, but they couldn't prove it wasn't, either. One of the benefits of being so secretive. He was never charged for any of the experiments that I _know _he performed on Muggleborns."

Harry reached out to touch her shoulder. He didn't know Furioso, either; he hadn't participated much in the political side of the Ministry, and it was other people, known Unspeakables, who had approached him about studying his visions. But he could add the rest of the story, now.

"They're obsessed with finding out where magic comes from," he murmured. "That's the way I would describe the ones who approached me about studying my visions, although of course they didn't use the word 'obsessed' themselves. They wanted to know how Muggleborns _got _magic, was their word, as if they believed that nonsense during the war about Muggleborns stealing pure-bloods' wands. They talked about how great wandless magic would be if everyone could use it. I think that was supposed to encourage me to believe that they would make a responsible study of my visions and so I could hand myself over to them. But they were part of the same faction. They have to be. They won't slow down and they won't conduct rituals on themselves because they want to watch their subjects instead. God forbid that the experimenter risk himself in the middle of the experiment."

Prince was smiling. Harry raised his eyebrows at him, and Prince nodded a little.

"This is the key of the story we need to present when we stage the demonstration to the Ministry," he said calmly. "The story of some people suffering might not move the public, unfortunately. Neither will the story of corruption in the Ministry. The _Daily Prophet _does an article on that every week. But the story of secret experiments going on for decades, experiments that anyone could suffer from and the Ministry hierarchy could plausibly distance themselves from, pretending it was only a small group? Oh, yes. _That _story, we can sell."

He leaned forwards. "And if you'll listen to me, I have an idea about planting rumors before we even start releasing the real story that will prepare the ground for us."


	7. Forerunners

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Seven—Forerunners_

"Of course we're sympathetic, Mr. Infanta." The reporter probably wasn't as insincere as Rita Skeeter, Harry thought, but she sure sounded like it. She divided her smile between Prince, who was disguised as Mr. Infanta, and Harry, disguised even more heavily by glamours with a thick hood over his face. "Who's your friend?"

They were sitting in a small, neat office of a small, neat paper, called _The Witch's Eye. _It was meant as a sort of rival to the _Daily Prophet, _but they'd had trouble attracting an audience, Prince had told Harry.

Harry had objected to going there to spread rumors instead of to the _Prophet _itself, and Prince shook his head. "They have too many wards on those offices that detect glamours. The _Witch's Eye _can't afford that kind of security."

So Harry had agreed to come here to start their lies, and he knew from Prince's nod that he should take the hood down. He pulled it back slowly, trying to give the motion the right sense of drama that Prince had talked about.

The witch gasped and cowered back in her chair. Harry knew his face looked awful, and he had only been allowed to watch from the corner of one eye as Hermione and Prince applied the glamours in the mirror. It made it look like he had a long, ragged red scar bristling with infection running from the corner of his jaw up the right side of his face, and burns on the left side, and one eye gone. He let his head loll on his neck and tried to keep from laughing.

Luckily, Prince was talking smoothly, and could distract the woman. "You see why we didn't want to go to the Ministry."

The reporter swallowed and raised a hand to touch the chunky gold necklace around her neck. Harry remembered her name then, seeing her toy with her jewelry. Opal Richards. Not that she wore an opal, but, well. What he remembered, he remembered.

"Why not?" Richards whispered a second later. "It looks like a matter for the Aurors to me."

Prince leaned forwards, his face mysterious. Up to this point, he had got them into the reporter's presence on whispers and half-truths, but he was going to reveal the "truth" now, Harry knew. "Not if the Ministry is the one that did this to my friends."

Richards gasped again, but Harry recognized the sound this time. Not so much fear as revelation. Almost satisfaction. She knew why they had come to her now, and unless Harry was mistaken—which he usually wasn't after years of meeting reporters—she was going to be happy to oblige them.

"Tell me _everything_," she said, and got out her quill. This one had some gold on the shaft, Harry noticed, privately amused. Who could write with a golden quill? Apparently a pretentious reporter who would really like to be Rita Skeeter but wasn't there yet. "How long ago did this happen? _What _happened? Who did it? Why hasn't the Ministry stopped yet?"

Prince began to murmur the tale they had agreed on. "The Unspeakables approached my friend here and asked him to help them in an experiment. They said they weren't completely sure, but they were fairly sure they could give him wandless magic. Of course, he agreed. Who doesn't want that?"

_Me, _Harry thought. But his role here was to sit still and drip, so he just let his jaw sag open and moaned a little.

Richards gave him an uneasy look, but she was breathlessly focused on Prince's story the next second. "What kind of wandless magic did they say they could give him?"

"Anything. Everything." Prince spread his hands. "He didn't ask about the specifics. They couldn't tell him any. They just said there was power, and if they could perform the ritual on him, he would have it. They didn't care about having power for themselves. They just wanted to _give _it to him, and then study it."

Richards shut her slightly gaping mouth and shook her head at Harry. "That's the point where I would have said that it was too good to be true, and run in the opposite direction," she murmured.

Harry let his jaw sag open some more. Maybe that prompted Richards to pay attention to Prince, or maybe she decided that she was tired of looking at him, but she swallowed and focused more on Prince for the moment.

And Harry could see it working just like Prince had said it would, the story, mingled with parts of Jeremiah's memories, and Narcissa's, and what they knew about using the altar, but not too much that was true, right at first. Their strategy was going to be to spread around dark rumors that were horrifying and grotesque, and then catch the public's attention, and reveal more and more of the truth later. That would lead their readers along a path where they were struggling not to pay attention, but were caught by the sense that the worst lay ahead.

And showing off the worst—the memories of Jeremiah and killing the twisted and anything else they could lay their hands on—wouldn't happen until they were ready to make the final move and cage their audience in the Ministry.

Finally, Prince ended his story with a little bow of his head and the whisper, "So, you see, we cannot trust the Ministry. The Unspeakables have tendrils _everywhere. _There may be people there who would know what we're talking about and try to help us, but they could be silenced or tricked or bribed too easily."

Richards's eyes were shining. Harry concealed a snort, which wouldn't go well with his glamour. Yes, she was going to appreciate a story of conspiracy and all the ways that she could exploit it more than she would a simple, straightforward one. Hermione had had questions for Prince at first about how the plan would work; Harry knew she liked to believe the wizarding press was better than it was. But even she had to admit, at last, that this was genius.

"You can count on me," Richards said, with a firm nod. "I'll spread the truth, and the Ministry won't crush us. I have an uncle who works there, high up in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. There's no way that he would allow them to do something to me."

That had probably been another reason Prince chose Richards, Harry realized. Or George had. He had thought they were simply approaching the best reporter of a smaller paper, but having kin in the Ministry was no small consideration.

"Thank you." Prince stood up, bowed to her, and held the bow for a long second. "You have no idea how relieved you make me. To see justice done at last…" He let his voice trail off, and took out his handkerchief to dabble at his eyes.

He was an acting _master, _Harry thought. There had probably been some of that about Snape, too, for him to fool so many people as a spy.

He thought this was a little over-the-top, really, but Richards swallowed it. She even gave Prince a smile that was almost maternal and patted his arm. "We'll see justice done. We _will_." She gave one more fascinated glance at Harry's glamour, and sighed. "I suppose there's no chance of a photograph?"

Prince shook his head and put his arm protectively around Harry's shoulders. "And no real names, either. I'm sorry. If all goes well, we'll come back in a week and let you take some pictures." He paused. "You're sure that you'll be safe if it doesn't go well? I hate to think of you getting in trouble because you were brave enough to help us."

Richards smiled at him, a little, wise smile that made Harry think she might be smarter than she looked. "I've had a few tangles with Unspeakables myself. They shouldn't be allowed to do what they do to decent people. Don't worry. I'll settle things."

"Thank you," said Prince, and bowed again, and bowed one more time. Harry resisted the temptation to dig an elbow into his ribs; he wasn't supposed to be coherent enough for that. But he didn't want Prince to overplay it and make Richards start suspecting something.

On the other hand, from the way she sighed and mooned over his face a bit, Harry supposed the chance of that was lowered. She was clearly a reporter who believed the world worked the way Rita Skeeter only wrote it worked. They'd made a good choice.

They Apparated once they were outside the _Witch's Eye _building, and Prince made a good show of peering theatrically from side to side, in case someone was watching them from the building and they had to put on that good show. They appeared outside Cuthbert's Corner, and Harry immediately removed the glamour from his face. Prince snorted a little.

"It's not so bad, compared to the way that people usually look at you, is it?" he asked.

"Having someone gasping at the way I look because they think I've been tortured isn't really any better than having someone doing it because they recognize the famous scar," Harry said dryly, and put his wand away. "What's next?"

* * *

"You think you can come up with some way to make them see the truth?" Draco asked, leaning back and studying the cage bars that bound in the Aurors Granger and Harry had captured at Number Twelve. "That would really be the best. Trained Aurors are a resource we shouldn't waste."

As he had thought would happen, those words made the Aurors start hooting derisively. Weasley—the one with the tricks—grinned next to him, and that made a few of the more cautious Aurors shut up immediately. The rest kept talking, and Draco was glad. That meant they missed the threat, and it was only effective on the few intelligent ones, the ones who could recognize an opponent when it appeared right in front of their faces.

"I think," Weasley said, "that I can come up with something."

He flicked his wrist, and Draco took a step back. Even though Weasley had reassured both of them—all of them—over and over that this was safe, it still had the effect of not making Draco want to stand too close to him.

There was a whirring noise that finally silenced the more determined jeers from the cages, and a tiny creature similar to Prince's metal hummingbird soared up from Weasley's hand. It had the form of a bird, too, but one that resembled an eagle. And it was made of gold that sparkled and glittered in the permanent _Lumos _charms they'd left to light the prison room.

The bird spun around slowly. Draco could hear Weasley muttering under his breath, and he knew it was a mixture of prayers and incantations that told it to stay in the air. They could use this particular trick only once, maybe twice if the bird didn't self-destruct on the way back to Weasley's hand, and that meant they had to pick the Auror they used it on very carefully.

Draco let his eyes travel along the staring rows, and found the victim he was looking for. He was one of those Aurors who had tried to ask questions about Jeremiah when Draco and Harry's Weasley had come out of the cage. He stood near the back, not the front, and his eyes were wide enough, and he panted enough. Draco thought his name was Arthur something, and he wasn't someone Draco remembered as being particularly corrupt.

He caught Weasley's eye and nodded to Arthur someone.

Weasley spun around and released the tiny eagle with a crack of his wrist. Draco concealed a wince. It sounded impressive, but he hoped that Weasley didn't need to use a wand today.

The little eagle flew straight at Arthur someone, nearly as fast as the hummingbird, and it was a long time before he thought of flinging his hands up in defense—too long. The bird dug into his shoulder, burrowed in with beak and claws, and got soaked in his blood. Then it buried itself there, and Arthur dug at it for a second, trying to pull it out.

Then his hands dropped down to his sides and he stared straight ahead, his jaw hanging and a stupefied expression on his face.

"So it begins," Draco told the other Aurors with supreme indifference. He ignored the mutters that were building up. "We can learn everything about you, and we can use it to our advantage. So this is what you'll get if you refuse to cooperate with us. You think the Unspeakables and the rituals they performed were bad?" He smiled around at all of them. "We're not actually bound by the Ministry's code of conduct anymore. We know that they'll kill us if they catch us. So we might as _well _go ahead and do everything we can to learn your secrets. There's no one to stop us now."

Weasley coughed a little. Draco turned to him as if reluctantly. "Yes? You had something to say?"

Weasley sighed and shook his head. "I do think that we shouldn't try to damage them," he said, his eyes on his bird. "They could tell us a lot more if they were allowed to keep their own minds."

"But we can get the secrets out of them, and they won't tell us anyway," Draco said, shaking his head wisely. He stalked back and forth in front of the cage bars, smiling, unable to stop smiling. Even though this was an act, he found that it was an act he _liked. _He was tired of playing nice, of agreeing with everyone, of not speaking up against the Ministry because it would only make things worse. The Ministry was the one who had created most of the twisted. They were the ones who had assigned Harry and Draco to the Socrates Corps and told them to kill the twisted, and then exiled them because they were too good at it. Draco wanted to destroy them, and he was going to be _good _at it.

"They're loyal to the Ministry," he said, and he put a shadow of his father on his face, in his voice. Lucius had taught him much, and if this was the only way his memory would ever matter to Draco again, it at least meant that he would put on one more show worthy of a Malfoy. "They won't tell us anything. They'll think that their loyalties are greater than their lives. I don't see why we should allow them to keep either one. Let them go, and they'll only run squealing back to our enemies."

"But we don't have to let them go," said Weasley, sounding a little weak. Draco wondered if he was about to lose control of his laughter, and hoped not. That would ruin _everything_. "We could—keep them here. At least for a while."

"And where would we get the money to feed them?" Draco sneered. "We already couldn't manage if it weren't for having a house-elf. The Ministry froze our accounts. The Ministry turned the public against us. There's _everything _except fairness here. I don't see why we should have to be fair to enemies who aren't fair to us." He spun around in place and stared at the nearest Auror, who recoiled. She was watching him instead of Arthur someone in fear now, and that was all to the good. "No, we have to get rid of them eventually. I think killing them is the most efficient way."

"Malfoy." Weasley touched his arm.

Draco glanced at him. He was about to lose control of the laughter, or so Draco thought for a second, given the way his eyes shifted about.

Then Draco realized the truth. Weasley's face was a bit pale, and he kept staring at Draco as if he had never seen him before.

He _believed _Draco.

Draco was the one who had to force down laughter this time, and instead turn around and scowl at the Aurors. "We'll still have to dispose of the bodies," he muttered. "But even that would cost less than the food."

He saw Weasley relax out of the corner of his eye. They had never seriously intended to murder the Aurors, and it seemed that Weasley was finally remembering it.

But Draco had to congratulate himself on his performance, if he had managed to keep Weasley going like that.

"I think our patient is finished," Draco added, as the tiny eagle finally pulled away from Arthur someone and flew back to Weasley.

Weasley gave him a stern look, as much to say as he knew that, and would appreciate Draco not interrupting his grand moment. Draco grinned back at him and stepped away, leaning against the wall, leaving their prisoners to stare uneasily at him.

Weasley cast his spells on the eagle, and it seemed that the snap of his wrist had been merely cosmetic, after all. Nothing crawled out of the blood on the eagle's claws, and the spells flowed easily back and forth across it. Then the blood began to turn silver, and Draco nudged the Pensieve into the prisoners' view. Until then, it had been sitting on the floor near Weasley's feet, out of easy sight.

Draco smiled as he heard several low curses from the watchers. Yes, they might well feel that way. Some of them would realize what was going on now.

An invention that changed blood into memory, and made literal all the pure-blood metaphors that most of them would have grown up hearing, either from pure-blood families or single parents, was indeed a wondrous thing.

Draco turned around to bend over the basin and see what the memories were doing. He saw Weasley holding his hand over the Pensieve, his expression intense and rapt, and then Weasley knelt down and plunged his head into the liquid. As near as Draco could determine, they were normal memories.

He didn't join Weasley. They would both put their backs to the prisoners that way, and if there was any time they might try something desperate, it was now, when Draco and Weasley had thoroughly frightened them. Draco looked at them instead, letting his eyes pass over their faces, absorbing what he could of their fear and their anger and their disdain.

Arthur someone was rubbing his arm and glaring especially hard. "It hurt," he said. "When it first attacked me."

Draco nodded. "And it would have hurt if you had managed to curse us. You were hiding inside Harry's house intending to curse us, weren't you?"

Arthur looked away. Draco smiled. Yes, they had chosen their victim well. They had wanted someone who had a bit of sympathy for them, and a bit of interest in what the Ministry was doing to the twisted without being told. Arthur asking about Jeremiah had been a good sign.

Weasley surfaced with a gasp, and stood up, and turned around to face Arthur. Draco moved out of the way a little. If his face or his voice or the combination of them both had frightened Weasley before this, now Weasley frightened him.

Not the expression, exactly. He just looked intense enough that Draco would have thought long and hard about opposing him.

"I know what you wanted most," Weasley said softly. "I know that you wanted the wandless magic to prove to your father that you were as powerful as you said you were, the summer you stole your sister's wand. I know that you didn't mean to wave it and curse your sister with those boils that still mar her face, and then you wished for the wandless magic to undo it. But you never could, could you? And you still think of your sister with those boils on her face because you weren't powerful enough."

Arthur recoiled from him. "What do you—you can't—" His voice croaked out.

Draco smiled, and Weasley smiled with him. Weasley's bird had been made to seek out any memories associated with wandless magic, including negative ones. This was the way into sympathy for the rest of them.

"I know that everyone wants it at one time or another," Weasley said, and turned around to meet pair after pair of eyes. "The wandless magic, the accidental magic. You want to cure wounds, or cause them. You want to grant your own wishes, or someone else's. You want to have the magical creature of your dreams, rescue one, take one away from someone else. But you never get it, and you forget about the dreams and wishes after a while, because why do you keep thinking about something impossible?"

They were all staring at Weasley. Draco kept from nodding, but just barely. Weasley had written most of this speech before they came into the room. At the moment, Draco was mostly impressed with how natural he was making it sound.

"That was what the twisted that the Ministry created wanted," Weasley whispered, now stalking back and forth in front of the cage. "Just a chance to have their dreams come true. The Unspeakables told them they could, and all they had to do was trust those same Unspeakables. People who knew all about Dark magic and artifacts and ways to use them _safely_. People who have those artifacts because they aren't safe for the general public to use. People who are supposed to be guardians and custodians."

He whipped around and made a woman near him recoil. "Would _you _expect to be turned into an insane monster because you tried to follow your dreams?" he demanded.

The woman shook her head, staring. Arthur was rubbing his arm as if wondering how all of that had come out of his blood.

"And neither did they expect it," Weasley said, letting his voice lower. "And they didn't _deserve _it." He paused, and Draco thought he was the only one in the room audibly breathing. "But that's what the Ministry did to them. That's the kind of thing we're trying to prevent more of. That's the kind of thing the Ministry is fighting to defend, and you're fighting to defend if you continue serving the Ministry."

He glared at them impartially, and then turned and stormed out of the room. Draco shrugged at the gaping Aurors and followed him.

"Good one," Draco murmured, once they were far enough down the stairs that he was sure no one could hear.

Weasley grinned at him. "You, too. You were brilliant. I was a little afraid you meant it."

"Only a little?" Draco asked, and then laughed when he got a sideways grin. It seemed Weasley was a better actor even than Draco had taken him for.

And if this ploy worked the way it should…

They would have a troop of witnesses on their hands. Maybe even willing fighters, or news-spreaders.

_It was worth the risk._


	8. On Wings of Rumor

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eight-On Wings of Rumor_

"You think we can trust them?"

"It's not so much a matter of trusting them," Draco retorted, picking up the copy of _The Witch's Eye _that Prince had retrieved and looking at it critically. "It has more to do with convincing them what we _might _do."

Harry sniffed a little as he picked up the tray of food and cast a Lightening Charm on it, shifting it easily across his arms a second later. "I don't think fear is the best tool for the job. There were times the Dursleys frightened me, and Voldemort, but that never meant that I stopped fighting them."

"You were rather an exception," Draco pointed out, arranging the paper carefully in his arms so that the picture of Harry's glamoured, disfigured face showed easily to someone beside him. They had discussed casting another glamour on the paper so that it looked like the _Daily Prophet_, but Draco had argued against that. If their prisoners got out and found that their captors had lied to them about what paper contained the story of the Ministry's treachery, they might start thinking rationally about other things, too, and the chance would be lost. "We'll just have to hope that we don't have too many Gryffindors among these Aurors,"

He saw Harry rolling his eyes out of the corner of his gaze. Draco smiled. Making Harry roll his eyes was one of life's little pleasures, for him.

He flicked up the latch, paper still carefully arranged, and together they entered the makeshift dungeon.

The Aurors immediately crowded to the front of their prison to stare at them. Draco kept his head up, looking neither to right nor left-at least on the surface. He had long ago learned to watch from the corner of his eye when he wanted to see someone taking something in and not be seen watching himself.

The Aurors saw the face in the photograph peering above his arm, and the headline too, which Draco had to admit had been brilliantly contrived by the reporter Prince and Harry had visited. _PRISONER DISFIGURED IN BIZARRE MINISTRY PLOT!_

"That's not true!" called the first Auror who dared to speak, a woman who had complained almost endlessly since the brought her here. Draco felt she was a bit of a kindred spirit, really.

"I don't know what's true and what's not," Draco said. Putting the paper down face-up on the floor, he turned to help Harry serve the meals. "The lies that keep appearing in the papers and coming out of the Ministry's mouths have taught me a whole new definition of what it means to be truthful." He smiled at the complaining Auror over his shoulder. "Have you thought of telling the Ministry that what they say can't possibly be true?"

The woman gripped the bars of the cage as if she would wrench them from the floor and throw them at Draco. "We were doing out jobs," she said. "The way you were until you decided to be too kind to the twisted."

"Is _that _the way the spun it for you?" Draco cocked his head winsomely in her direction, then shook it. "Oh, dear."

He must have got the note of amused contempt in the last words right, because this time the woman rattled the bars in a teeth-grinding way. "Tell us your side of the story, then," she sneered. "If it wasn't being so kind and forgiving to a twisted that you got an innocent killed, what was it?"

Draco sighed and slid her tray under the bars. The woman stopped it with one foot, never taking her eyes from him. "To hear our side of the story," Draco told her, eyes gentle and unwavering, "you would have to listen. Not stuff your ears with cotton made of your orders and believe you were enlightened."

The woman snorted loudly enough to scatter food, if she'd had it in her mouth, and looked around the prison. "I think someone here can give you an open mind," she said. "Start talking. You might be surprised."

"Tempting," Draco said, rising gracefully to his feet and reaching for another plate to slide beneath a different part of the bars. "But we have other things to do."

"I'd like to hear it, if she wouldn't," said a different Auror, a man with long tangled brown hair who stood near Arthur, the one Weasley had taken blood from. "I'd like to know what you thought you were doing, and what the Ministry thought you were doing."

"I want to hear it," said the complaining woman, giving the new Auror an evil glare. "I never said I wouldn't. I just never promised to _believe _it."

"I don't need the stress and worry of telling the whole story to a hostile audience," Draco said, shaking his head at her again. "A mildly sympathetic one might do. A curious one. But not you."

He was almost sure he heard Harry snicker behind him, and don't turn around to frown at him only because that would be more disastrous than the snicker. But from the quarrels that were springing up now, he thought the chances of them hearing it were lessened.

"I _never said _that I didn't want to hear it," the complaining woman said, and looked like she would stamp her foot on the floor, except that she was wearing Auror robes and some things were beneath her dignity. "I just don't know what they could say that would challenge what we heard from the Ministry."

"There speaks the implacable bias," Draco inserted sadly.

She turned around and glared at him. "Has it occurred to you that the best way to remove the bias is to tell your bloody story?"

"You provide me with _such_ a temptation," Draco said, making sure that she saw the roll of his eyes as he reached for another tray.

"But this is the only way that your story will be seen and challenged for what it is," the woman insisted, leaning against the bars and squashing the sandwich that Kreacher had so kindly prepared for her. Draco thought of telling her that she wouldn't get another one, but she was in full flood and disinclined to listen to him. "Lie or truth, you can only get people to believe it if you tell them."

"But with a completely hostile audience, all I would be doing is wasting my breath," said Draco. "You haven't offered me a good reason so far."

She looked as though she might rip her hair out, but she did manage one smile that could have been triumphant, seen from a different angle. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Once a Death Eater convinced that the audience will be hostile to him, always a fearful Death Eater."

There was a clatter behind Draco as Harry put the trays he still held on the floor. "So you would believe it if the former Chosen One told you?" he asked. His voice was harsh.

Draco rolled his eyes. They had agreed that Draco would handle the acting, because he was better at it. Harry had done all right going along on that interview with Prince, but frankly, all he'd had to do was sit there and drip. He would be less effective blending truth and exaggeration into the delicate brew they needed the Aurors to swallow.

On the other hand...

Draco studied the Aurors pressed against the bars, staring at them, who were in turn studying Harry. Draco had them halfway to convinced that they hadn't been told the whole story. They might listen better to Harry than to him at the moment.

With a fluid motion, Draco stood, leaving the food where it was and shaking his left sleeve back from his Dark Mark. "They're all yours," he told Harry, and tried to sound resentful.

Harry bowed his head a little and turned to face the silent, watching Aurors again. "How much were you told about Head Auror Ernhardt?" he asked.

Draco raised his eyebrows, but maybe that was the right place to start. He leaned back against the wall, and tried to make himself invisible. Their attention should be solely on Harry now.

* * *

Harry knew very well they were glaring at him, and why. They might listen to him more easily than they would to Draco, given the Mark on Draco's arm, but another way of looking at things was that he was the hero who had betrayed his own side.

But he could tell the truth, and they would send them out int the wizarding world once they heard it. If even one of them thought it could really be the truth and spread it around, they would have a weapon to counter the Ministry's side of things.

So he waited, and finally the Auror Harry couldn't help thinking of as the whiny one muttered, "We know he was the Head Auror. And you killed him."

"Did anyone ever offer you a good reason for that killing?" asked Harry into the silence that followed her words.

Glances went back and forth between them. Harry barely contained his snort at some of the kinds of glances they were. Uncertain, shoving, the kind he used to get when a horde of his fans confronted him all at once and then stood there waiting for some uniquely brave one to attack him first.

"You hated him," said the only Auror among them Harry had known slightly. She was a haughty woman named Vesta Bernos, her voice and face just as hostile as those of the woman Draco had spent so much time playing with. "That would be enough reason."

"He assigned you to the Socrates Corps and left you there to rot," said someone else. "Everyone knows that wasn't a promotion."

"Everyone except me," Harry said dryly. "I was fool enough not to question it. I'd just lost my partner." He hesitated, but decided there was no reason for this bunch of vultures to know just how close Harry had been to Lionel, even if they _were _vultures that they were training to fly at their command. "I had seen something that wasn't supposed to exist-a kind of insane Dark wizard, similarly evil to Voldemort if not that bad. I knew some of the other Aurors in that Corps had seen similar things. I thought we were isolated to concentrate our secrets. Not to throw us away."

"You were always making trouble," Vesta said, her eyes narrowed with dislike. "It's not surprising they would have started resenting you, when your fuck-ups were always on the front page."

"And that's enough reason to kill someone?" Harry smiled at Vesta. "What an interesting idea you have about the morality of being made Head Auror. I suppose I should hope that you never end up there."

Vesta gave him the ugliest sneer he'd seen in a while, which was saying something, with the amount of practice Draco had. "You think you would get your job back, after this? That's almost...charming, really."

"I don't hope it for my sake," Harry told her quietly. "But for the sake of those who come after me, and probably won't know any more than I did about Ministry politics when they start. Nothing about the way other Aurors resent the ones who get written up in the papers. Nothing about how other people don't see the blood, only the glory you never wanted anyway."

Draco coughed gently behind him. Harry knew why. He was meant to tell them the truth about Ernhardt, not rejoice in his own sad story that they probably wouldn't believe anyway.

"Ernhardt was a twisted," Harry said. "He had the gift of possessing other people, riding their minds and bodies. Their eyes turned blue when he did. He discovered that we could be dangerous to him when we started solving cases that killed twisted, instead of nicely and neatly dying the way they had all expected us to."

"I heard something about that," said Vesta, in the kind of tone that implied only someone with a defective brain would believe the rumors she had heard. "That doesn't mean it's true."

"If you don't want to give me a fair hearing, you might as well not listen to me," Harry snapped back. "You can cover your ears and I'll speak to the people who want to hear." He turned his back on her and faced the others. "We set a trap for Ernhardt. It was difficult. How could we trap someone who could leap bodies? If we killed his original body, then he would just turn someone else against us. We had to make sure that we trapped him in his original one."

"Why did you have to kill him at all?" asked a smaller Auror, a man, with a neatly pointed beard that was starting to grow out of neatness the more time he spent in the prison. "Why couldn't you bring him in, the way that Aurors are _supposed _to do with their prisoners?" He looked around at the others and preened a little, as though he suspected himself of having scored a point.

Harry snorted in spite of himself. "You don't know very much about Socrates Aurors, or you didn't pay attention when we were trying to tell you." He ignored Draco's chiding frown at him. Well, the idiot _hadn't _paid attention, it looked like. "We were allowed to kill the twisted we hunted. In fact, we had to, unless we could fulfill a whole bunch of other conditions that were all aimed at preserving other people's lives. That was the difference between us and the rest of you. We had to commit murder. And the Ministry was fine with that, until the time came when we turned against its Head Auror and they had to_witness _a murder live."

The small man looked ill. Someone else said, as hastily as though they didn't want Harry getting angry at him, or maybe talking about murder again, "But it wasn't a murder, was it? Someone said that you were still hunting Ernhardt after his supposed murder. So you didn't kill him."

"The Ministry wants it both ways," Harry said, rolling his eyes. "They want to pretend that we didn't kill him because it made a good way to punish us for failing, but on the other hand, they had a body. When it suited their purposes, then they could accuse us of murder later, using that body as proof."

"Not everyone who works in the Ministry is the same," muttered the little man. "Not all of us knew the truth. Some of us supported you."

"Well, you sure as shit didn't speak up about it where we could hear you," Harry snapped back. "So the fuck what if you supported us in your _hearts_? That doesn't mean that you support us now, or that you'll stand up for us against the Ministry."

Vesta coughed to get Harry's attention back again. "We might," she said, "if you could tell us what happened at the supposed scene of Ernhardt's murder, and make it comprehensible."

Harry shook his head right back. "He jumped bodies. We thought we had him trapped in his, but he escaped into one of the Socrates Aurors who had been consumed by her own practice of dabbling in necromancy." He wasn't sure he should reveal yet that a lot of the Socrates Aurors had their own flaws, and might have become twisted with a little push in the right direction. "We had to hunt her. We finally managed to rescue her and eliminate Ernhardt, but we can't offer a body this time. So the Ministry can accuse us of murder with the body we _did _present and say we didn't offer enough defense of our actions to show that Ernhardt is really a twisted, and not just someone we didn't like."

"You can't blame them for that," Vesta said. "It's widely known that you didn't like him."

Harry stared at her, then snorted. "Widely known by _who?" _he asked. "Neither of us had any more contact with him than an ordinary Auror until we started chasing him."

"I believe she refers to the common perception that you got into as many scrapes as you did to disoblige the Head Auror," Draco drawled. He was watching Vesta with what looked like amusement, but it was hard to tell with his eyes lidded the way they were. "So you must have hated him."

Harry chuckled despite himself. "It was usually Okazes I annoyed. If I annoyed Ernhardt before I became a Socrates Auror, it's news to me."

"I said it was a common perception. I didn't say it was right." Draco rolled fluidly to his feet. "And they'll always have some pretext to disbelieve you. I say let them. Get rid of them. We'll find a way to let the world know the truth without them."

Vesta held up a hand. "No need to be hasty, " she murmured. "I never said that we weren't interested, you know. You were the ones who wanted to convince us, not the other way around."

"Those two statements contradict each other, at least in their suggested course of action," Draco replied, staring at her. "I think you don't care and you're stringing us along while you try to come up with some way to escape."

Vesta flushed in a way that made Harry think Draco was probably right. But she cleared her throat and turned back to Harry as though she had never looked away. "The Ministry was supposedly also creating these twisted that they used you to hunt?"

Harry nodded at her, with a small smile. "And Ernhardt was the one who controlled the assignments to the Socrates Corps. He saw that we were dangerous, and by reviewing the files, he could keep track of other twisted who might be able to challenge or locate him."

Vesta looked suddenly thoughtful, but someone else said, "Hang on. I thought twisted were like You-Know-Who-insane. How could Ernhardt stay sane enough to run the Auror Department, if he was really in that state?"

Vesta looked a little smug, this time. Harry shook his head. "We met a twisted who could make other people into twisted, and not even realize she was doing it. I don't think all of them are insane. Healer Alto came across as the victim of a lot of obsessive admirers, not a twisted. Ernhardt was another one of those, I think. Not as sane as Alto, but enough to recognize threats coming his way and deal with them."

The man with the neat beard chewed his lip and muttered, "And from this stew we have to try to choose what to believe."

"We can't force you to believe a certain thing," Harry said gently, and ignored Draco's mutter about the Imperius Curse from behind him. "We can only give you information about us to replace the false sort the Ministry gave out."

They didn't look entirely convinced, but after a minute Vesta mumbled, "You can go on."

"Thank you for the permission," Harry said sweetly, and ignored the scowl on her face to continue telling the tale of Ernhardt and what he had done to them.

* * *

Draco watched the faces of the Aurors watching Harry, and saw the way their eyes hardened and glowed. Not all of them believed, but some doubt was entering their minds. And this was gossip, this was rumor, about the Chosen One and a Death Eater. Draco knew they would be hard-pressed to keep it to themselves once they left.

And that was all they wanted, to turn them into gossip-mongers and rumor-spreaders, not allies.

Draco sniffed and leaned back against the wall. He would have done it differently, he had to admit. _He_ would have spun the story out further with threats and suggestions, and dangled the truth in front of them for them to worry and bite at. He would have made them afraid _not_ to spread it by the time he was done.

But he had agreed that Harry could do this, and Harry seemed to enjoy it, in an odd way, even when he had to correct really stupid misconceptions about what Ernhardt had done. He wasn't born for the part of a hero, he kept claiming. Draco thought he put his life in danger and played up to the public like he was one.

Draco did see belief growing on a few faces, though, and more attention than they would pay at first, when he was talking with the woman who complained all the time. If Harry responded to adoring faces, they responded to him.

It would work. Draco was reasonably confident that the Ministry would rue the day it tried to destroy their lives, at least.

_And then?_

Draco cocked his head. He hadn't thought much about what they would do once they had reclaimed their reputations and punished the Ministry for betraying them.

One thing only he knew: he no longer wanted to be an Auror, one of these people peering wide-eyed from the cages.

Maybe it was worth thinking about what he wanted to be instead.


	9. First Battle

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Nine—First Battle_

"That's all of them." Hagrid shoved the Pensieve towards Harry. His forehead dripped with sweat. Harry knew why. It hadn't been easy for Hagrid to use the broken halves of his wand to pull his memories of Ernhardt from his head and drop them into the Pensieve. He'd had to rest several times and do it across a couple of days, instead of all at once.

Harry raised a hand and squeezed Hagrid's arm. "Thank you," he said. "I appreciate you doing this, Hagrid, really." He didn't know if Draco, or even Ron or Hermione, would say that to him, so he'd taken it on himself to do it.

Hagrid beamed at him and patted his shoulder, nearly sending Harry a couple of inches into the floor. "Yes, well," Hagrid murmured bashfully. "I owe yer a lot. And yeh've been doing a lot of good with the thestrals."

Harry gnawed his lips to keep himself from snorting. That mattered most to Hagrid, he thought, caring for the thestrals and treating them as true partners. Maybe it was a good thing that Voldemort had never tried to corrupt Hagrid with promises of fair treatment for magical creatures. Hagrid would have been on his side if he had made it convincing enough.

"Thanks," he repeated, and took the Pensieve upstairs, while Hagrid headed out to calm the thestrals. He said they were getting more and more restless, the longer they spent in one place. In the Forbidden Forest, they had room to roam and didn't have to obey a summons to a feeding place if they preferred to hunt their own meals.

But if Harry was right and Hagrid's memories were as precious as he expected them to be, then the thestrals would have the chance to leave this place and roam about soon.

He patted the side of the Pensieve, and then adjusted it to make sure that he wouldn't spilled any of the precious silvery liquid. The last thing he wanted was for Hagrid to have to do this all over again.

* * *

"You think that his memories could tell us anything that we don't already know?" Draco looked doubtfully at the Pensieve standing in the middle of the room. He had to admit, he wasn't eager to look into the half-giant's memories. They were sure to be repetitions of what they already knew.

And he had a collection of toys from Weasley—the other one—and Prince that he wanted to look at. They had given them to Draco and explained that they hadn't been able to think of a use for them in battle. The challenge was for Draco to figure out a way they would be useful, at least as distractions. The chance to play with powerful magic and to show how smart he was was irresistible.

"I think we should at least look at them, and see."

The taut way that Harry held his jaw made Draco decide he wasn't going to get out of this by pleading a previous commitment, or boredom. He sighed and put aside the latest of Prince's toys, another hummingbird, this time with wings of pearl and a shrill buzz when used that would make the chains underneath it entwine. It was a toy to entertain children, but Prince—and so far, Draco—was at a loss how to make it more than that. "Fine. I don't want you to go by yourself."

Harry grinned at him and extended his hand. Draco walked across the workroom to clasp it. "Afraid that you'll be left behind and won't understand our enemies as well as I do when we face them?"

"I want more taunting material to use against the Ministry," Draco said instead, smiling at Harry as they bent over the Pensieve together. "What I know already is starting to stale from lack of newness."

Harry would have retorted to that, but by that time, the memories had engulfed them, and they were standing a second later on the floor of the Forbidden Forest. Draco stared around, his brow furrowed. He knew the near reaches of the Forest well from his sixth and seventh years at Hogwarts, and the gathering of Potions ingredients he had done then.

There was no trace of familiarity in the trees around them. Draco wondered exactly how far the half-giant would wander in search of his pets.

_A pity that he probably wouldn't share the knowledge even if we asked for it, because he would be too worried about us disturbing the nesting place of some rare bird._

"Hellbound!"

The noise nearly startled Draco into leaping away from Harry, until he realized it was the half-giant's voice, and the light swinging past them at a near distance was the half-giant's lantern. Sniffing, and ignoring the way Harry peered at him mockingly from the corner of his eye, Draco studied the path of light left by the lantern's arc. It sparkled in a small pool and off a thestral's footprint filled with water on a game trail, but still he didn't know where they were.

The half-giant himself came into sight a moment later, bending over to examine the footprint, and then straightening up and nodding excitedly. "I'm coming!" he bellowed into the distance, before pushing forwards.

Draco snorted again. Hellbound had to be the name of a thestral, then. At least the half-giant had more imagination than Draco had thought.

Together, they followed Hagrid at a distance until he came to a stop and stared, swinging the lantern around. "What…?" Draco heard him pant.

Harry began to hurry, seemingly forgetting that this was just a memory and he couldn't help the half-giant no matter what was going to happen next. Draco restrained him with a hand on his wrist, and got a glare for his troubles.

"I'm doing the best I can!" Harry whispered, and Draco sighed and gave in, creeping forwards along with him.

He just didn't see how it would do any good. They would see the source of this memory, the evil that Hagrid had encountered of Ernhardt's spinning, sooner or later. Why hurry to meet it?

The "evil" was a thick fence that stretched through this section of the woods. It looked like it was made of thorns woven together, along with scraps of dark spiderweb that Draco identified without hesitation as Acromantula work. Inside the pen milled a number of thestrals, snorting and kicking each other.

Draco frowned. Thestrals could fly, and the pen didn't seem to extend up into the sky. What was holding them here?

Then he saw that the same dark spiderwebs coiled across the wings of the captive thestrals, binding them to their sides, and that one of the larger prisoners was Carvenhoof.

Draco let go of Harry's wrist to reach for his own wand, only stopping when Harry raised an eyebrow at him. "I don't like it, either," he said, and turned to pay attention to Hagrid again.

The half-giant stomped along the perimeter of the pen, looking more and more upset. The thestrals followed him with their sickly white eyes, stamping their hooves in response and whinnying shrilly when Hagrid called to them. At last Hagrid roared, cast down his lantern, and did something that it was hard for Draco to see in the suddenly wildly swinging light and shadows.

Then Hagrid's shoulders heaved, and the pen shifted a bit. Draco opened his mouth, then swallowed. Yes, it was useless exclaiming like this over something that had already happened.

He resolutely ignored the way that Harry was standing beside him with his arms folded and a grin on his face.

Hagrid was _lifting _the pen. He tore at it, and the thorns that had rooted it ripped from the earth. The spiderwebs lashed out, reacting as part of a defensive spell that Draco had never seen before but would dearly like to learn, but they couldn't do anything. They landed on Hagrid, and he shrugged and tore through them, his muscles moving smoothly under his skin.

The half-giant roared once, and the webs that had tried to gain some sort of purchase on him snapped. Then he heaved the pen to the side and threw it so that the thorns cracked and split. The thestrals promptly stampeded out, and Hagrid bent down and began to pick the webs out of their wings with more delicacy than Draco had thought those huge hands could muster.

A second later, a shadow stirred at the other side of the clearing.

Draco wanted to gag as he saw the flare of intense blue eyes. He reached out, and Harry's hand was already there, moving towards his. He was glad that they understood each other so well, and could cooperate without even a word.

Ernhardt had been the hardest foe they ever fought, and to see him alive again in this memory, even if it was in his own body and not one he had stolen, made Draco want to shudder. It was hard to stand still as Ernhardt stepped out of the shadows and studied Hagrid in a leisurely way. It even made him want to defend the half-giant.

He leaned on Harry instead, and shivered.

"Why did you destroy my research project?" Ernhardt's voice was soft, and might sound sane, if you didn't know what you were listening for.

"It wasn't yer bloody research project." There was still a touch of thickness about Hagrid's voice that would have made Draco reluctant to be alone with him. Ernhardt didn't look nervous about it, but then, Draco had already noted Ernhardt's insanity, both inside and outside this memory. "It was my thestrals! You caged 'em!" He made a stabbing motion with one finger towards Ernhardt, and Draco had to wonder why this memory didn't end with him storming over and ripping Ernhardt to pieces.

Then Carvenhoof came up behind Hagrid and nudged him in the back, and Draco thought he knew. Hagrid immediately turned around and melted over the thestral. "What did he do to yeh?" he crooned, scratching behind the thestral's eyes in a way that Draco knew would probably get _him_ mauled if he tried it. "Did he bind yer wings?" He gave Ernhardt another dark look and started to pick at the webs on Carvenhoof's wings again.

Ernhardt closed his eyes and swayed a little. A second later, his body slumped to the ground, and Hagrid staggered to the side as if someone had hit him on the temple.

Draco felt his skin ripple. He hadn't had the chance often to see Ernhardt actually possessing someone, since they had usually been at a distance when that happened. Now the question was why Hagrid had managed to survive the memory.

He hadn't even opened his eyes to let Draco see the blue in them yet, though, when Carvenhoof gave a terrible neigh and moved in front of the half-giant. He was practically prancing, his wings unfolding as much as they could when they still had some webs on them, and his hooves scraping and stamping on the ground. He locked his feet in place and tilted his head back, pointing his nose at the sky.

His second neigh seemed to stagger Hagrid as much as the entry of Ernhardt into his head had. Hagrid gasped and opened his eyes. Draco could see a blue spark guttering in them, but it seemed to be losing out against the normal brown.

"Car-Carvenhoof…" breathed Hagrid, reaching out a hand.

The thestral came forwards at once, ducking his head and rubbing his muzzle against Hagrid's hand. Draco sniffed. He was glad that he had only seen this memory after he had ridden with Carvenhoof once and been assured that the thestral liked him. Anyone seeing this would think that Carvenhoof had never had a friend in the world except Hagrid.

Then the thestral's eyes began to burn. Draco stared uneasily, aware that Harry was doing the same thing beside him. Could Ernhardt possess an animal? Draco wasn't sure that he had ever seen him try. He had animated some, sure, but those had either been skeletons that he'd used Macgeorge's necromantic gift on after he took over her body, or companions of the twisted he had possessed.

But the spark that appeared was dark instead of blue, and other thestrals were crowding forwards as if they meant to assist Carvenhoof. In a few seconds, a solid wall of thestrals stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of Hagrid, and then bent in around him like a crescent moon. It was its own cage of glistening dark hides and white eyes and flapping bat-like wings that the thestrals extended to join the edges.

Hagrid shut his eyes. The blue spark in them had been growing bigger, but when he reached out and put his hands desperately on the necks of two thestrals, Carvenhoof and a mare next to him, Draco doubted it would go on growing.

He was right.

The thestrals all reared at the same time, and cried out together. Their voices echoed through the Forest, although the only effect on the trees seemed to be some leaves swirling down, faster and harder than Draco thought they would have otherwise. The Forest shivered and strained against invisible bonds, and was silent.

The cries hammered into Hagrid, though. He went to his knees, and began to heave. As the thestrals continued their seemingly effortless stance on their hind legs and cried out again, the vomit flowed forth more copiously from Hagrid's lips, and Draco had to turn his head away. Not even for the sake of watching a defeat inflicted on Ernhardt could he keep watching _that_.

He turned back only when he heard the hooves of the thestrals hit the ground again. They were crowding around Hagrid, nudging at his hair and ears. He reached up and smoothed his hands along their necks, sobbing his thanks.

Across the clearing, Ernhardt's body revived. He stared in silence at the scene for some moments. Draco strained, but they were standing too far away to see if he showed fear, and they would have to move around Hagrid and the thestrals to get closer.

Then Ernhardt turned and vanished into the darkness.

Draco exhaled in frustration. If Hagrid had been paying more attention, been more alert, the threat of Ernhardt could have been ended then and there. He didn't seem vulnerable to Ernhardt's possession, and the thestrals didn't, either.

On the other hand, there was no reason Ernhardt couldn't have Apparated. Draco had reason to know that the school's anti-Apparition wards didn't extend into the Forest.

"Draco?"

Harry was pulling on his hand. Draco blinked, and slowly lifted his head from the dark and dripping basin. The Pensieve memory had ended, and he'd been so involved in thoughts of different futures that he hadn't noticed.

Harry cast a charm that caused any clinging droplets of the memories to rain back into the Pensieve, and nodded slowly. His eyes were aglow in a way that made Draco nearly recoil, until he reminded himself, first, that Ernhardt was dead, and, second, that he had made people's eyes glow with anything _but _happiness and excitement.

"We've got the evidence we needed," Harry whispered. "The Ministry might be able to explain away the Head Auror's keeping and binding thestrals in the middle of the Forbidden Forest. 'Secret Ministry reasons' or 'Unspeakables' explains so much. But here we've got evidence that he also possessed people."

Draco had somehow lost sight of their original purpose in hoping to find that, and he grinned at Harry now and swept him into his arms, dancing him around the room. Harry lifted and twisted away just enough that they wouldn't upset the Pensieve.

"They'll have to listen to us about Ernhardt," Harry whispered. "They _have _to."

Draco hesitated a little over the passion in his voice, holding Harry out at a distance. "The Ministry probably never will," he said. "You know it's the public we're hoping to convince, so they'll demand some kind of accounting from the Ministry."

"It's the public I was thinking of," Harry said, and tightened his hands on Draco's arms, staring into his eyes. "But the Ministry beyond them, and the way that we can make them pay attention to us. The way the Ministry people who said that we were lying will have to pay attention to _them_."

Draco could have opened his mouth and done what he could to ruin the triumph shining in Harry's eyes. He could have pointed out that many of the Ministry people who had claimed Ernhardt was innocent had been doing it for policy reasons, to get rid of Draco and Harry as embarrassments. Whether they believed it or not was irrelevant. They had been willing to say it, which made them enemies.

But in the meantime, there was that shine, and the fact that they didn't need to take anything away from each other. They had already lost enough, in the conspiracy of their real enemies.

Draco clasped a hand behind Harry's neck and leaned in enough to kiss him. "Yes," he said quietly, when he drew back from the dazed expression on Harry's face. "We've done it."

* * *

"Ready?" Hermione gave him a nervous smile across the mane of her thestral.

"More ready than you look," Harry said, and ducked the package she tried to hurl at him. She immediately Summoned the package back, of course, because it was important, looking contrite, and tucked it into the saddlebag again.

"I've come this far," she said, and faced the front again. "And I swore that I would help you. I think I can take a little flying. Flying to the Ministry when we went to the Department of Mysteries was more dangerous than this."

"That's right!" Hagrid said, passing her thestral and poking her, gently for Hagrid, in the ribs. Hermione still grunted and reached up to rub the new bruise. Hagrid didn't notice, turning with sparkling eyes to Harry. "And we're going to avenge the thestrals?"

Harry nodded. "We are." He managed to keep his balance as the thestral he rode shifted beneath him. It still felt like riding several brooms, all determined to poke him in the arse, but those hours of practice had paid off. At least he knew there was no way that he would fall off now.

Hagrid chuckled excitedly and went to mount the lead stallion. Harry looked around. Draco was behind him on Carvenhoof, and Ron on the other side of Hermione. Harry thought it was a good place for him, and not only because their thestrals were a mated pair who flew together by preference. Ron would be there to catch Hermione if her head spun and she started falling.

Behind them sat Prince and George, both as comfortable on thestrals as if they had trained there. Harry shook his head a little. He supposed that they might have practiced with harder tricks, in the past.

Hagrid coughed. Harry turned to the front in time to see him lift a bulging saddlebag, slung on a sturdy rope over the lead stallion's withers rather than tied to a saddle, and shake it.

"Remember!" he called out. "Yeh have to get the bag open and shake 'em as hard as you can! And not until yeh see the whites of their eyes!"

"You would think _he _thought this plan up," Draco muttered.

Harry gave him a look, and Draco subsided, his hands stroking Carvenhoof's neck. Carvenhoof turned his head and let his nose rest against Draco's forearm for a moment, the one with the Dark Mark. Even though the Mark was hidden under clothes right now, Harry saw Draco's face soften and clear. Harry smiled. Affection was still so rare in Draco's life that even a thestral showing it to him wasn't to be despised.

_I have to make some effort to be alone with him when we get back. We've had to spend too much time with the others lately._

"Right," said Hagrid. "Then _up_!" He flipped his hand out, and the lead stallion spread his wings and charged the edge of the cliff.

The thestrals were lifting beneath them even as they ran. Harry snorted a little. He actually wasn't sure why they needed to lift off the cliff instead of just flapping off from where they stood.

But he had to admit that it was exciting and dramatic, feeling the wind in his hair, feeling the flick and hum of hooves beneath him, and then the sudden sheer drop beneath the hooves, the reeling sea below, and the spiky mane of the stallion he rode rustling against his hands.

He threw his head back and drew in deep breaths of rich, salt-impregnated sea air, and the thestral beneath him gave a small buck and headed higher.

In seconds, Carvenhoof and Draco were flying beside them. Harry reached across the slight distance between, while he still could, to clasp Draco's left arm, in the same place that Carvenhoof had touched with his nose. Draco looked back at him with the same gentle expression in his eyes.

"Steady on," Draco whispered.

Harry nodded, and winds parted them. They whirled higher and higher, heading north and east at a speed that was almost frightening. Harry wasn't a boy anymore, and he had spent hours training with thestrals now. He knew exactly how quickly they could fly, and he had to fight not to shiver, as much with the exhilarating speed as with the coldness of the wind as it blew past him.

The landscape beneath them changed, flowing from mountains to forests to farms to roads to houses, although most of the time they were so high that Harry could only make out general shapes. He wondered for a second what would happen if they rode the thestrals all the way to Hogwarts, and swirled around the castle's towers. That would give the Ministry and the papers a story, for sure.

But they had a closer target, and in an hour they were among its towers instead. London, thick clouds and charms protecting them from the Muggles' view as they soared.

The thestrals slowed and dropped at Hagrid's bellowed command, and Harry scanned the buildings. It hadn't been so long that he had seen the Ministry from outside that he'd forgotten what it looked like, but it still took him a minute to locate it, and see the wizards hurrying towards it, although the ones visible on the streets were dressed in Muggle clothes.

"_Target_," Hagrid said, in a whisper that still blew Harry's hair back like the wind.

Harry cast a _Diffindo _on the saddlebag, his thestral hovering with impossible grace as he did. They didn't have to do fighting maneuvers yet; this wasn't the time. But the thestrals began to swirl back and forth, passing each other, almost touching wings. The flight that had come with them but didn't have riders withdrew, hovering in turn, ready to attack if someone interfered.

And the leaflets that they had put together with Hermione's skill at Copying Charms and George's illustrations sifted out of the bags and began to fall into the alleys.

So that they wouldn't end up confusing innocent Muggles and perhaps getting the Obliviators called out—Obliviators who probably wouldn't confine themselves to Muggles—the leaflets had a simple charm on them that would draw them to the nearest magic. Most blew into and stuck to wizards, who pulled them off their clothes with confused looks on their faces.

Only, of course, until they started reading about the experiments that the Unspeakables had performed on Jeremiah and other innocent people, with Harry's disfigured face prominent on the front page. Then confusion usually turned to horror.

Laughing maniacally, Harry tossed his empty saddlebag into the air and shredded it, only making his thestral flick its ears a little. Draco imitated him a second later, grinning at him in perfect kinship and understanding.

_This is the real beginning of our war._


	10. For Tomorrow We Die

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Ten—For Tomorrow We Die_

"We've done all we can," Granger said, and set her mug down in the middle of the kitchen table with a bang.

"Except figure out a use for some of the toys that we gave Malfoy to work on." Prince sounded complacent, one hand even stroking his beard in a motion that had been used by grandfathers around the world to make their grandchildren think they were forgiving, but his eyes shone hard in Draco's direction.

Draco snorted. "No. I didn't have enough time." While Prince was still blinking from the fact that he'd admitted it, Draco took out the hummingbird Prince had given him with the chains hanging beneath it and held it up. "But I did figure out a use for _this_, which I reckon is more than you expected me to do."

"I didn't expect you to," said Prince, his eyes narrowed a little as though he was trying to figure out what Draco was playing at. "That doesn't mean that I'm not pleased." He settled further against the back of his chair and looked at Draco.

Draco smirked at him and tossed the hummingbird into the air. That was the signal that made its wings begin to whir, and it tilted back and forth in place above the table, the chains braiding around each other and swinging wildly, entangled.

Prince opened his mouth. Draco knew, _knew_, it would be something pseudo-comforting about how they couldn't expect results right away, and took great pleasure in casting the spell that commanded the bird nonverbally, so Prince wouldn't be able to know how Draco had done it until he asked.

The hummingbird sped forwards, its chains enlarging and untangling themselves so that they formed into a loop. By the time Prince got it and started to rear back, the loop of chain was around his neck and tightening against his windpipe. The hummingbird turned back the other way and began to drop the next loop over his ears, prefatory to strangling him.

"No need," said Prince, holding up one hand and bending forwards so that he wouldn't pull against the strain. "I'm convinced."

Draco gave him a thin smile and cast the next nonverbal spell that would stop the bird in its (hovering) tracks. "Are you?"

"I am." Prince stared straight at him, and nodded. "You're not as good an inventor as I am, or Weasley," he said. "But you show some promise as a spell creator."

Draco paused. It was not a career that he'd ever considered for himself. For one thing, spell creators tended to work in relatively low-level jobs. They specialized; they created spells for clothing, or wands, or brooms, and just functioned as part of a greater industry, with no renown for themselves. It was the wandmakers' names that everyone remembered, not the names of the spell creators who came up with the proper way to put a phoenix feather inside a wand without splitting the veins or bending the edges.

But Draco had had enough of prestige, at least of the kind that having his name on the front page of every paper offered him, and he suspected Harry might be the same way. He found himself chewing his lip and leaning back in his own chair, contemplating the ceiling. Already he was wondering where he could go and what ways he could show this promise Prince talked about.

"Draco? The bird?"

Draco glanced up in absence that was all the greater, he thought, because he really had forgotten about the hummingbird that was almost strangling Prince. "Right. Sorry." He gave Prince an insincere smile and spun his wand, and the loop of chain fell away, shrinking back into the normal size a moment later. The hummingbird became a motionless toy the next second, and fell to the tabletop with a clatter of wood and metal.

Prince picked it up and stroked its back. "Promise, indeed," he murmured.

"Draco always has that."

Draco reached back and clasped the possessive hand that Harry laid on his shoulder, recognizing the edge in Harry's voice. _He's not really making fun of me, _his clasp of Harry's hand said, and a moment later Harry relaxed, squeezed once more, and let him go.

"I do," he said, and stood up, smiling around at Granger and Prince and the Weasleys, who both sat on the other side of the table. "Are we agreed that we'll leave in the morning?"

Granger nodded. "Hagrid is out talking to the thestrals right now, and making sure that they understand what they're supposed to do."

"I don't think there's much of a problem with that," Draco said dryly, thinking of the strength of Carvenhoof's body shifting beneath him, the way his wings had snapped and he had soared straight to the destination. Of course, part of that was probably the will of the herd and the guidance of the lead stallion as much as anything else, but Draco preferred to think that it was really Carvenhoof who had come up with the way they would fly. "But we'll leave you alone for right now."

He turned and clasped Harry's hand. He had hoped that he wouldn't need to explain what he wanted, and from the way Harry was smiling, he didn't. Harry probably would have been happy to bend him over the table and kiss him right there, but he honored the tender sensibilities of his friends and pulled Draco towards the stairs again.

"We haven't made the decision about when we're going to release the Auror prisoners yet," Weasley complained from behind them. "You'd think that you could at least stay long enough to talk about that—"

Draco turned and stared at Weasley. He couldn't have seen his own face unless he was holding a mirror, but there was something frozen and effective in his eyes, it seemed, that shut Weasley up without a murmur. He looked down at the table and cleared his throat awkwardly.

"So," he said. "Right."

Draco considered that an improvement on the long explanation he would have demanded otherwise, and which Granger already seemed to be in the train of giving him. He drew Harry on up the stairs, and didn't wait until the bedroom door had closed behind them before slamming Harry against it and kissing him.

There was a sound downstairs that might have been Weasley dropping his teacup, and then a sharp flow of words that was _definitely _Kreacher scolding someone, no matter what had happened. Draco smiled against Harry's lips.

* * *

Harry had planned to make this solemn and tender, since they were going to begin their assault on the Ministry the next morning and they could die doing it. They had a pretty good plan, all considered, and they had the advantage of allies inside who had written them during the past week to coordinate the plans. And they had Prince and George's toys, and the thestrals, and the memories, and the confused Aurors, who they were going to release the next day. Their assault on the Ministry would take more than one day to complete.

But the Ministry was likely to have traps and guards of their own, and it was possible that he or Draco might fall victim to one of them. So Harry had wanted to say something to Draco that was moving and profound, and also something that expressed how very much he loved him.

Instead, though, it was like this, Draco sweating under his hands and twisting so that it was hard for Harry to even help him get his clothes _off, _and wincing when Harry touched a bruise that he thought came from sitting on Carvenhoof's broad back. Harry pulled his shirt out of the way and bent to suck on the bruise.

"Just like that," Draco whispered in ecstasy, his neck arching back. "Oh, you _know _what I like."

Harry did, and he ended up smiling around the flesh in his mouth. Draco seemed to feel the smile, and paused in his twisting to look down at Harry, who was kneeling on the floor beside him.

The seriousness came back.

Harry let Draco's side go with a pop, and reached up to take his hands. Draco let him do it, although there was a brilliant shine to his eyes that told Harry how hard Draco was working against the shedding of tears. He wouldn't really forgive Harry if Harry made him cry.

Tonight, Harry didn't need to make him cry. He just needed him to listen.

"I love you," he told Draco, who stared down at him as if memorizing the expression on Harry's face or the way that he knelt in front of Draco would make this more real. "I love you so much it hurts, and I wish that I had—I don't know, a ring and the ability to marry you in front of everybody. I wish I had the ability to give you your parents back."

Draco shook his head, eyes still suspiciously bright, but no longer as hard. He might not mind some of the soppy stuff, then, Harry thought, relaxing a little. "You convinced me that I was better off without them," he muttered, drawing Harry up until they stood on the same level. "Don't ruin the fine effects of all your speeches by telling me that you regret that, now."

"No," Harry said, and wondered how he could say it, holding Draco's hands, cradling his arms in his. "But—I wish I could give you everything you want because you're special and you _deserve _it, not just because you need it."

Draco showed him a small, private smile. "You're doing a good job now," he murmured, and curved an arm around Harry's neck, and led him as firmly as he could towards the bed. Harry moved with him, unable to take his eyes off Draco's face right now, which meant the bed came as a surprise and he fell into it with a grunt.

He started to sit up and reach for Draco, but Draco gave him an unexpectedly fierce look and said, "You wanted to give me what _I _wanted?"

"Yes," Harry said, and lay back with his arms above his head on the pillow, as Draco proprietorially positioned him.

"This is what I want," Draco said, and then smiled at him with his eyes shining like the sparkle off hematite. "For now. I'll probably want something else tomorrow."

"It would be more boring being with you if you weren't like that," Harry said, and then Draco stopped his mouth with a kiss.

* * *

To touch Harry this way was freeing.

Draco had endured years of loneliness, after Daphne, the woman he had thought he would marry, went to Azkaban for murder. His partner Kellen Moonborn had supplied the place of someone he could work with and trust to guard his back in a dangerous situation, but outside the Ministry, they pursued their private lives and had their own families—or didn't. With his parents rejecting him for seven years even before they decided to forget him, Draco had made casual acquaintances, invited home some people who didn't want an emotional connection any more than he did, and talked to portraits and colleagues he had to work with from time to time. He had wanted something more, but he hadn't been willing to compromise his standards—such as swallowing his pride and bending his neck to his parents—in order to have it.

Harry gave it to him, freely, without asking for it. That had been true almost from the beginning of their partnership, long before they had become close outside saving each other's lives. Draco didn't know why it was different with Harry than it had been with Kellen, but it was.

And he intended to savor it, not do something that would put his lover off.

Harry lay there, smiling and waiting for him, and Draco started by running his fingertips rapidly and lightly down Harry's sides, as if he was playing a harp. Harry gasped, and his face turned red, while he too obviously tried to keep his hips from twitching.

"You're just teasing now," Harry whispered, his face turning an even darker red. He let his head roll back, and looked up at Draco with his eyelids fluttering, as if he knew that would provide an irresistible temptation for Draco. Sure enough, Draco had to lean down and kiss them shut before he could continue.

He moved on to investigating the little freckles, the moles, the twists of skin, the corners that lapped oddly and weren't scars, the marks of bruises, all over Harry's chest and legs and arms. By the time he returned to Harry's sides, sucking marks under the ribs because he didn't think there were enough there, Harry was whimpering, high and sweet, and he had only kept himself from reaching out for Draco by linking his fingers behind his head. Draco paused and reached out to draw one of those hands free, gently massaging Harry's fingers until they opened fully. Harry whimpered again.

"I can't take much more of this," he whispered. "Let me touch you, or do what you're going to do."

Draco laughed a little and flopped down in the bed beside Harry. "What if I'm not going to do anything more than this, and we'll just both roll over and go to sleep now? Would you do that, if that was what I wanted?"

The horrified look on Harry's face surprised more laughter out of him, but he didn't get to enjoy it for long before Harry swallowed and nodded. "Of course I would," he whispered. "If that was what you wanted, and a good night's sleep on the night before what could be our last struggle. If that was what you wanted…"

Draco leaned over and kissed him, more moved than he could say. "It's not what I want," he whispered into Harry's open mouth.

"Thank fuck," Harry muttered, and then closed his lips into the proper kissing position and his eyes into the proper dreaming position at the same time.

Draco rolled him slowly deeper into that dream, one of slow, long touches, not the quick or teasing ones that he'd been doing until now. And Harry went with it, moaning in a way that reminded Draco of the sounds he heard when he was drifting somewhere between sleep and waking, not all of them real.

But this was. And it was beautiful.

Draco played Harry until he thought Harry was back near the pitch of passion he'd been in before Draco's question, and maybe even past it. Then he laid one hand on Harry's chest, and waited until Harry opened his eyes and looked at Draco. He was so distant, so beautiful, that Draco's breath caught, and he nearly didn't have the ability to proceed.

But Harry smiled at him, trusting, obvious, and Draco found that he had the nerve after all.

He had to grope after his wand, something more difficult than he had anticipated when he couldn't take his eyes from Harry's face. Harry smiled at him again, and his legs fell open and his hips began a rising, languid, lazy dance. Draco gasped and kissed him again, hungry enough to devour. Harry welcomed him with hands and lips and eyes.

Draco finally managed to get his own arse and fingers slicked, and reached out to stroke Harry's cock. Harry threw his head back with a silence more exquisite than sound, and his cheeks were the color of plums.

Draco reared high, his heels braced on either side of Harry's legs, and then sank down onto his cock.

It was so long and slow that Draco lost track of time. He forgot the battle the next day. Those words whirled away from him and disappeared down the long tunnel into the distance. He was moaning and shuffling back and forth on his heels, mind focused on Harry's cock the same way his body was.

Everything became part of the same insistence, the tugging, pulling insistence that flamed to life in his stomach and sped through his stomach to the rest of his body. Draco was slick and wet, hot and messy, and everything that he moaned seemed to find an echo in something Harry did or said. Harry's hand was sliding slickly down his back, and his groans were entwined with Draco's until Draco thought that someone sticking their head inside the room wouldn't know which one of them was which.

That was what finally made him come, slumping over Harry's hips and gasping as he landed on his stomach. Harry followed him with one last triumphant grunt and thrust, and then wrapped his arms around Draco and hugged him tight, mess and all.

"It's all right," he whispered into Draco's ear.

Draco started to say that he _knew _it was all right, and what was Harry talking about, and then realized that he was crying, his stomach convulsing with sobs, as though the pleasure had left sorrow behind as a residue. Harry stroked him and murmured to him, and Draco wrapped himself around his partner, holding, clinging, willing their bodies to melt together the way their sounds had.

"It's all right," Harry breathed into his ear.

And it _was, _and Draco needed to stop being so stupid. Only he couldn't stop crying.

"We'll survive the battle tomorrow," Harry whispered. "The first stage of it. We'll retreat if we have to. We have good allies. They won't let this go wrong. If one of our allies inside the Ministry had been compromised, we would know from the others. We'll live."

Draco couldn't find the words to say that he was crying about far more than their chances of surviving the battle tomorrow, maybe about wounds that he had never cried for, wounds carried inside him and sealed shut for years. But Harry seemed to understand him without Draco needing to say anything, because he continued saying soothing things, things about the Malfoy family and Draco's record as an Auror that Draco didn't need to listen to.

He just needed to know that they were being said.

* * *

"And you really think that this is going to work?"

Harry put a confident smile on his face and turned to Hermione. They were on top of one of the great flat roofs in London, under a charm that would prevent Muggles from seeing them even if they glanced up. Beside them, their thestrals stamped and stirred. Below them, beneath them, the Ministry bustled on.

Or it would, until the moment when they burst through the doors and put a stop to its normal functioning, beginning the motions that would herd great sweeps of people through the doors and into the Atrium.

"I think that it should work," Harry said. "Otherwise, everything that we've come this far to do is in danger."

Hermione made an impatient noise and threw a crumpled piece of paper at him. "That's not what I mean," she muttered, while Harry wondered where she had _found _the crumpled piece of paper given that they had the thestrals and their wands and a few Pensieves and nothing else, really. "How likely do you think it is to work?"

Harry eyed her. "Fairly," he said. "Or I wouldn't have put you lot in danger."

Hermione folded her arms. "_Not _that comforting, Harry."

"I don't know how much more comforting I can be," Harry said, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. This must be Hermione's version of pre-battle jitters. He didn't think he'd ever actually been through that with her before. Most of the time as kids, they'd just leaped into battle before thinking about it, and when they hunted Horcruxes, the painful times had been the long and grinding ones.

Which he supposed this was, in a way, standing around on a roof waiting for a fight to start.

"I think this plan has a good chance of success," he said. "Draco and I worked it out first, but you and Ron and Prince and George have added refinements since then that make me more confident in it." He looked over his shoulder to where Hagrid stood with the lead stallion, hands on either side of his neck, shaking it solemnly back and forth while Hagrid gazed into the thestral's eyes. It was his version of communing the way Harry and Hermione were doing, Harry thought, and as likely to produce comfort as anything else. "And you're _here_," he added, his gaze going back to Hermione. "I always feel better when you and Ron are fighting with me."

"Then why did you wait so long before you contacted us?"

Harry winced. _Damn. _But he did have an answer. Whether or not Hermione would like it was a different matter, of course. "Because at the time, I thought the Ministry was sane and the rules worth obeying, and the rules said that I couldn't tell anyone the details of what I did in the Socrates Corps," he said. "I didn't have enough proof to fight a battle with the Ministry then, anyway."

"We would have helped you find some." Hermione's head was up, her nostrils flaring furiously.

"I appreciate that," Harry said, which he did. "But when the Ministry tried to get rid of us the first time, Draco and I just wanted our jobs back. We managed to achieve that. We should have known it would only be a slight break before we would be kicked out again." He sighed. "I'm glad that you're here to help us now, when it actually matters."

Hermione gave him a tremulous little smile. "You're never going back to the Ministry, are you?"

"Even if we wanted to, we couldn't," Harry said, shaking his head. "Even this will only take out the people who were fools enough to speak against us and claim that Ernhardt was an innocent victim of our murderous plans. We could never be sure that we didn't have enemies lurking somewhere else in the Ministry. And I don't want that to happen."

Hermione smiled at him this time, and Harry was grateful to see real understanding in that smile, rather than the urge to make him compromise with the Ministry that he had half-feared. "As long as you know what you want," she said, and squeezed his hand, "then I think it'll work out better than trying to go back."

Harry didn't know how to say that he and Draco had no solid plans for future careers, so he didn't. He turned and looked out over the Ministry instead, and saw the signal they had agreed on: a turtle Patronus, gleaming in an alley beside the Ministry entrance. It was Hale's. It raised its head and tail high, and then vanished.

Harry swallowed and drew his wand. Hermione stared at him, scandalized, since they weren't going to cast spells—supposedly—until they were inside the Ministry, but Harry conjured his silver stag and murmured, "Go to Diane Athright and tell her that the revenge she helped us plan is beginning."

"Another ally we never met?" Hermione asked, as the stag bowed its antlers and vanished.

Harry nodded, his eyes never wavering from that place the turtle had been, even as he climbed onto the thestral. "She has a right to witness what she fought for."

What Hermione would have said, he didn't know, because the thestrals spread their wings, and Draco and Carvenhoof were beside Harry and his mare before Harry could look for them. Harry touched Draco's hand and smiled at him.

Then their thestrals leaped off the roof.


End file.
